In 2016, the Spanish photographer Arguiñe Escandón sent her Swiss friend and collaborator Yann Gross a postcard. The vintage recoloured print showed the 19th-century explorer Charles Kroehle in the Peruvian Amazon surrounded by Indigenous people with a huge “trophy” crocodile laid out in front of them. Kroehle was among the first western travellers to photograph Amazonian tribes, but his eventual fate is unknown. Some reports have it that he was killed by an arrow in the jungle, others say he walked off and never returned. On the back of her postcard Escandón wrote to Gross: “I hope you don’t end up like him”.
The postcard was the genesis of a three-year journey the two photographers took in the Peruvian Amazon rainforest and a book, Aya (ghost), which attempted to examine the spirit of Kroehle’s travels in light of postcolonial criticism of his kind of “exoticism”, and the real environmental challenges faced by the descendants of those Indigenous people. The book is full of images like this one, which both celebrates the visual strangeness of some of the rituals the photographers encountered, and grounds it in the communities they lived among. This photograph is included in the Arles festival exhibition, Grow Up, which is devoted to the interaction of humans and the natural world.
