This humble image is perhaps not as immediately striking as some of my others. It’s quite subdued and it almost didn’t happen at all. I made it while travelling along the Trans-Amazonian Highway, which was built by the Brazilian military dictatorship in the 1970s, through the heart of the rainforest, in order to “develop” it. In fact, human development and cultivation have existed in the Amazon for millennia – indigenous ways of living alongside nature rather than dominating it. The road’s construction brought widespread ecocide that continues unchecked. My recent work in the Brazilian Amazon is, in many ways, a portrait of this road and its devastating impact on the world’s largest tropical rainforest.
After Jair Bolsonaro took office in 2019, millions of his supporters in the Amazon felt encouraged by his government to clear the land for cattle pasture, soya bean fields, and other forms of agribusiness. Burning kills everything, including species we haven’t even heard of yet. Driving down the Trans-Amazonian often felt like passing through hell.
