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The Arts Intel Report

A Cultural Compass
For the World Traveler
A Cultural Compass
For the World Traveler

Claudia Andujar: The End of the World

Claudia Andujar, Untitled (from the series “House”),1974.

Glockengießerwall 20095 Hamburg, Germany

At 92, Claudia Andujar has spent almost half a century advocating for the rights of the Yanomami, an Indigenous people of the Brazilian Amazon. Andujar was born in Romania in 1931. After the Nazis entered the country, her Swiss mother escaped with her to Switzerland; her Jewish father perished in the Dachau concentration camp. When the war was over, Andujar immigrated to the United States, where she studied humanities at Hunter College; she then traveled to Brazil in 1956. While working there as a photojournalist for magazines such as Life and Fortune, she began documenting the Yanomami people. Fascinated by their culture, which was remarkably untouched by the modern world, she embarked on a lifelong campaign to preserve their ancestral territories from development. Andujar’s photographs—taken between 1974 and the early 2000s—reveal her remarkable access to this highly isolated population, and capture everything from dramatic mortuary rites to everyday domestic scenes. —Paulina Prosnitz

Photo: © Claudia Andujar/courtesy of Galeria Vermelho