 Hello everybody. I'm Ortencia Calvo. I'm the Director of the Latin American Library. And I am beyond happy to welcome all of you to the library this evening. I would like to thank especially Thomas Ries, who is the Executive Director of the Stone Center for Latin American Studies. And who has partially supported this event. And also David Banish, the Dean of Libraries at Tulane, who always supports the Latin American Library. I also want to say a special hello to friends from the New Orleans community who have come and braved the parking situation at Tulane. So hopefully we'll make your time worth watching. It's very hard to park on campus. So of course our guests of honor, João and Fatima Facas. Welcome. A very warm welcome to you. Once again to New Orleans and to the Latin American Library. And I just have to say that I think with João and Fatima, they got the thing for New Orleans. It's something that happens to you and it happens to a lot of us who are from the parts of Latin America that are part of the African diaspora. I know because I'm from Cartagena in Colombia and it happened to me. You come here and you just walk around and within minutes you feel an attraction, you feel an affinity to New Orleans. You feel the poetry of New Orleans. Not every place, believe me, has it. And I think it happened to the two of you. So I know it happened to the two of you. So I hope what this means is that we will collaborate in many projects in the future and that you will come many, many times to New Orleans and to Tulane. It's such an honor to present the work of João Facas, one of Brazil's most renowned documentary photographers. João was born alas in Sao Paulo. He was born in Sao Paulo, but he's an adopted son of Bahia, a place with a lot of poetry, much like New Orleans. He graduated with a licenciatura in philosophy from the University of Sao Paulo and also studied at the School of Visual Arts and the International Center of Photography in New York. And over the years he has worked for the principal magazines of Brazil such as Veja and História, serving as photographic editor of História. In 1986, João won the Aberge Award as well as a grant from the Veja Foundation for the Amazonia Project, of which this exhibit is a projection, a development of. And since then, João has produced several major photographic series, including projects that document life in the coastal city of Tancoso in Bahia, the carnival masks of Maragogipe, also in Bahia, and the large tropical wetland of Pantanal, which are ongoing projects. You can see photographs from some of these series in the looping images shown on the large screen in the lobby and as well as a documentary featuring João and other photographers that was being shown here but is now in the back on the other screen in the seminar room. In 2015, João launched the exhibition and book, Amazonia Ocupada, which was exhibited first by the Sesqui in Sao Paulo and curated by Paulo Herkenhof, one of Brazil's most renowned curators. 41 selections from this exhibit form the basis of our exhibit here of Amazonia Ocupada. The project documents Brazil's gold rush from the 1980s and 1990s that brought so many prospectors to the Amazon River Basin, a huge area which is about the size of the continental United States. Not all of it in Brazil but it is huge and they went there to search for gold and to find their fortunes but unfortunately wreaking havoc with local populations, local indigenous populations and with the natural environment. And I am just thrilled that we have recently acquired a total of 22 limited edition and signed photographs from the Amazonia Ocupada series by João Fartas to form a permanent part of our image archive at the Latin American Library which will be made available to researchers, to students and for the classroom. We have a very special program tonight. We begin with a conversation with João led by Christopher Dunn, a professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Africano studies here at Tulane. Chris's research focuses on cultural politics during the period of the Brazilian dictatorship in the mid 20th century. He also works on popular music, race relations and black culture in Brazil. He is the author of Brutality Garden, Tropicalia and the emergence of a Brazilian counterculture from 2001. In 2016 he published Contra Cultura and Alternative Arts and Social Transformation in Authoritarian Brazil, both books published by the University of North Carolina Press. And with Charles Perron, he is co-editor of Brazilian Popular Music and Globalization from 2001 and with Idelbert Avelar, he's the co-editor of Brazilian Popular Music and Citizenship from Duke University Press. Chris and João will discuss the making of the photographic series, Amazonia Ocupada, the exhibition, its historical context and its relevance today and many, many, many other things. But what we hope is that the conversation sparks questions from the audience about Brazil and so we can open the dialogue to everyone. They will be speaking for about half an hour, twenty minutes, half an hour? Yeah, maybe even less. I want to make sure that we have time. Everyone is included. In addition then to viewing João's extraordinary photographs displayed on our walls all over the exhibit. I hope you've had time to see some of it. I also hope you have time to look at our exhibit cases. There's one back there and there are two in the lobby and the four in here. We try to weave a complementary story to interact with the photographs that traces some of the most notable western conceptions of the Amazon over the last 500 years through the rare books and maps from the Latin American Library's Special Collections. And in this way we suggest a dialogue between João's complex vision of the 80s and 90s gold rush and a broader historical context of varying and often destructive efforts to appropriate and master the abundant wealth of the Amazon which is often called the lungs of the world. And it is particularly important now that we look at this age old story and that we are reminded of these incursions and their destructiveness, especially now when political events in Brazil are conspiring to erode these long fought protections of the region. So to conclude I have to say that this exhibition and this event have been the product of truly joyful and sustained collaborations over a year ago. Well, Chris Dunn first came to me to propose this project and his boundless enthusiasm, his passion for everything including Caipirinhas, we have him to thank for that, and his knowledge had been the driving force from the beginning. He and João Facas curated the photographic portion of the exhibit with probably a little meddling from Chris Hernandez and from me. The selection and description of materials and the narrative that we wove in the exhibit cases were the result of a really dynamic conversion of contributions by Chris Dunn, by Christina Dandes, the curator for Special Collections at the Latin American Library, Rachel Stein, who is our research and instruction librarian at the Latin American Library and for me. As we brainstormed and then we explored and unearthed some of the treasures of the Latin American Library to try to weave this story, I was surprised at some of the things we found. It was amazing. And then, of course, Felipe Cruz, I don't know where Felipe is. He's hiding! You have to talk! Felipe Cruz! Yeah, you're hiding, you can't hide from him. He's an assistant professor of history here at Tulane and he brought his page, another passionate Brazilian, a Brazilianist. You're a Brazilian. He brought his passion for technology to the mix in ways that will enhance our experience. And given that we don't, can you just say briefly what they can do to do this? He developed an app for this exhibit that we're trying out today. So it's just a little companion. So it's an app that's a companion to the content of the exhibit and allows it to kind of delve deeper into the work of Jean-Farquas. And it's an augmented reality app. And if you don't know the term, compared to virtual reality, just something that you look at the actual reality around you and adds virtual elements. So if you download it, you can look at the photos and the map around the exhibit with your cell phone. And you get some extra buttons and virtual buttons that you click on. You can see videos of Jean speaking about the photos. You can see some satellite imagery of the locations where the photos are taken as well as curatorial information about them. So what's that? So it's a curator as in augmented reality AR. So curator AR, curator, curator Farquas, if you look. And unfortunately, it's not available for iPhones today. Yes, yes. They're a little more picky about that. When is the virtual reality version going to be available? The virtual reality version released next year. We'll allow you to walk through the Amazon and experience that yourself. So if you have an Android phone, you can download it. It's not reach your friend. We have a tablet running around. You can borrow my phone for a little bit if you want. But yeah, just look around and you see little icons floating under the photos and you can click on them and learn more about the work and see kind of a deeper dive by Jean explaining the photos and the context and the characters. So that's it. Thank you so much for all that work. And the exhibit will be up until August. Yes, the exhibit will be up until August. So by that time maybe Apple has responded and people with iPhones can use it. And we may have, who knows, Felipe might invent something else by then. So I also have to say that hands down, I work with the best group of people on the planet. I work with the people at the Latin American Library. And I also besides Chris Hernandez and Rachel Stein, Veronica Sanchez, Madeleine White, Carol Avila and Sarah Kittleson were instrumental. This doesn't happen, trust me. My most especially to and grateful to Joel for allowing us to serve as a repository of his work for that honor. And also for his generosity and laid backness in allowing us to experiment, to understand and to kind of improvise also as we created the exhibit cases to improvise on his vision of Amazonia. So thank you so much for that. So please join me in welcoming Joao Arcas and to the opening of the exhibit, Amazonia. Thank you, Ortencia. I wanted to add my own words of gratitude and of welcome here. And I want to start by thanking Ortencia, the director of the Latin American Library, who has really just done amazing things with this space. I arrived here in 1996, so I've been here for a long time. And we we had a wonderful director before. But I have to say that Ortencia has just created this space into something that is so welcoming and interactive and intellectually engaged. Those of you who know me here on campus know that I spend a lot of time here at the Latin American Library. I have a Carol here. I love my department, my home department in Spanish and Portuguese, but I actually prefer to work here in my Carol and be here. And I spend a lot of time here and it's a very special place for me personally and intellectually. And so it's a great pleasure to be able to participate in this program here at the LAL. A word about Ortencia. We've been working very intensely on this project for the last year. And she is, I can tell you, very energetic, intellectually brilliant and also very detailed oriented. We have a whole category that we used as a shorthand and it's called Rafia Questions. And that comes from this little ribbon, this black ribbon of Rafia. And this came out of a discussion that we had one day where she was just trying to decide what color of ribbon, what color of Rafia we should use. And it was very important. She said these are the little details that are very important. And then it became the Rafia and the Kashasa question and what to do about that. So these are all things that are very important to Ortencia and I think that has contributed to making this a very, very special event. I also want to thank all of the staff of LAL that worked so passionately with us to put this event together. Before going on, there's a few other shout outs I guess you could say are welcome, special welcome. Because we have some visiting scholars from other universities, two of whom will be participating in an event tomorrow. Amazonia Ocupada Symposium. And for those of you who have a program, please look at the back of the program and you will see the schedule of events. We start at 10 a.m. over in Jones Hall at the Stone Center for Latin American Studies. And joining us tomorrow in addition to four faculty members here at Tulane. Chris Lane, Felipe Cruz, William Ballet and Sarah Melman who's a PhD student. We have two visitors, Seth Garfield from Professor of History from the University of Texas. So I believe this there in the back. And Beth Conklin of Vanderbilt University and anthropologist from Vanderbilt University. And I hasten to add that we have a selection of books related to Amazonia here and their books are there. So if you want to consult them, they're very important scholars of Amazonia coming from two different but related disciplinary perspectives. And we're so delighted to have them here. As an additional line up, Broadwyn Fisher is here from the University of Chicago. She's actually unfortunately not going to be able to participate in this symposium but gave a wonderful lecture last night on her work on race and urbanity and speciality, if you will, in the city of Recife. And so welcome and I'm so glad you're able to join us tonight. This is a very special night for me personally. I have known Joao and Fatima for over 30 years. In fact, I was first friends with Fatima going way back. And I have to say before I talk a little bit about Joao that Fatima, sometimes I look at Joao and I think that's the world's most interesting man. You know, the Doseke's commercial with all the travel. And I said, but Fatima is actually more interesting. And she has had quite a career herself. When I met her, she was working in furniture design. And then she got into music production and concert promotion and then moved back to Sao Paulo and created all kinds of amazing things for the house lamps and everything back into design. Then became a yoga master and opened a yoga studio, then a Roma therapy and now, and I can't even keep up, I'm only giving you half of it. And now she is creating her own line of jewelry based on the cultural religious symbols of Bahia in Salvador and she's wearing something right now. It's not meant as a commercial, but I did want to also draw attention to this amazing person right here. Fatima, which is how I got to know Joao. And over the years, we've had tremendous conversations and a couple of years ago, he showed me this catalog. And I'm wondering if we can pass it around and you can see more of the photos because we weren't able to use all of them. And I said, well, we should do something at Tulane and that's how this all started. But to start the conversation finally, I know that's a lot of prologue. I did want to ask you, Joao, about the origin, how this all came to be. Remember that these photos are from now almost 30 years ago, more than 30 years ago, right? And yet in an interesting kind of way, so timely. And I was wondering if you could talk about the origin, how it came about this project. Okay, I will avoid number one, excuse my English, I'm not a native speaker, but I think it's better than speaking Portuguese. So I was working, after a school, I went working in photography. And I ended up being a photographer and an editor at Weekly Magazine, like Time and Newsweek. And so I worked there for four or five years, very good school, very good projects. I came once to the Amazon for again. And of course, all Brazilian photographers working in photojournalism were very attracted by the Amazon. I'm sorry people can't see us in the back, but I think it's more friendly if we stand up. And I'm not the title, so excuse me. So the Amazon was always an attraction for Brazilian photographers because the Amazon is like more than half the country. And in the 80s until the 80s, it was very difficult to get to the Amazon unless you lived in Manaus or in Belém or some other cities around. It's very scarce populated and no roads and no airplanes to go. So it was like leaving a neighbor to a very interesting subject and not being able to reach. So I think that feeling was in almost all my colleagues. And so one day I got a call from Ricardo Lessa, which was a reporter from Weekly Magazine, and very fond of the Amazon subjects. And he tells me, look, there is all this gold rush in the Amazon as we knew. And I was called by a prospector. The actor was the president of a union of prospectors, gold prospectors. And he invited me to go to the Amazon with a photographer. I said, are you kidding? Because these guys were having the worst media possible. They were having like 100% negative media because they were destroying the Amazon. They were killing the Indians. They were destroying the rivers and so on. And how come they are inviting us? And because actually you could not reach the Garimpos because mainly they were very far away in the middle of the jungle and you could only reach them through a smaller plane that would land on that area. And the owner of the airstrip was the owner of the region. So you would only get in if you were allowed and they wouldn't allow anybody. So you could go to Serra Pelada, which was a very huge mine, open mine, with 60,000, 70,000 people there. Because there were roads going there because it was a region explored by Vale near Carajás. But other than that you couldn't go, you couldn't reach this place. They wanted nobody to see. But this very smart man, I will remember his complete name, he thought he was very smart. He said, we have 100% negative media. So if we bring someone here, maybe they have like 5% in favor of us. Maybe they understand why we are here and who is here and exactly what we are doing. He thought that maybe showing what they were doing could get some more of a real vision and not a preconceived. So we made an agreement with him. The first agreement was of course they would not kill us. Which was even afterwards. And we didn't make any compromise. We didn't say that we would publish anything. We were just going there. So they took us to maybe four or five different locations around. Without their support it was impossible to get there. And with their support it was very, very good. Very good. So we were amazed. We spent like 10 days going forth and back in the Amazon, different places. And I was absolutely amazed by what was going on there. We met all these people from all over the country. From different regions, from different backgrounds. This craziness going after gold and roads and lambors and commercial people and missionaries and everything. So I talked to Ricardo. We are not stopping here. Let's do the story. And we didn't know that it would take us 10 years and a lot of effort to come back. Because the Amazon is very, very, very spread out. Subjects are like sometimes from Gilbranco to Belen. It's easier to come back to Sao Paulo and then fly again to Belen. Because there is no connect flight. So we never knew beforehand what we were trying to do and what we would achieve. And I want to stop talking because I'm talking too much. No, this is wonderful. And I wanted to follow up because first of all it reminds me that this documentary in Portuguese is called Amazonia or seeing the Amazon that features interviews with some of the major photographers of the Amazon region including Giral. But also includes an interview with Ricardo Lessa, who is a very prominent journalist in Brazil still to this day in which he mentions that they were invited up there. But he told them, he said, look, we're not going up there to do propaganda for you. We're going to just go without any, you know, and we're going to report on what we see. And sort of what was explaining. But then the follow-up question, this is something that I actually never really understood because Ricardo later on actually published a book, a small little book that's in one of our cases out there, Vitrines, out there. And actually comes a little photo of shows while in Ricardo circa 1990 on the Trans-Amazonia Highway. And it's called Amazonia Asairista Destruição, the Roots of Destruction. But I'm curious about the journalistic reporting that Ricardo did in any publications in popular magazines that would have had an influence on how the Brazilian public regarded the Gaudí info. I mean, did your work there have an impact at that time? Or is it only later that you've been published in Amazonia Ocupada? Was there journalistic publications that intervened in the discussion around that at that time? Yes, there were several publications, different aspects. Also because the way we got there was selling stories, partial stories to different magazines. So, for the São Paulo, Jornal do Brasil, even Boudia, the rubber and tire company, they had a beautiful magazine in Brazil and they hired us to go to Acre to photograph the rubber tappers. There are some of the pictures of them here. So, we did some specific stuff. That's how we could reach these places. Even General Motors landed as a car, a truck, so that we could do the Cuiaba Santarém Road, which is very funny because it's a road that was open in the 70s. So, we got this car in Cuiaba, in Mato Grosso, and the plan was to go to Santarém. So, we got to Cuiaba, we got this car from General Motors, and we stopped in a gas station and the guy asked, where are you going? We said, oh, we are going to Santarém. The guy looked at us, how are you going to Santarém? We said, oh, we're going to take the road. He said, there is no road. And we said, how come? It's in the map. He said, oh, yes, it's in the map, but it's gone. They built the road. They gave the land to settlers, to people from the south. You can even see somewhere pictures from people from the south of Brazil that came not to search of gold, but to farm. The settlers were there, and they never maintained the road. So, like six years in a month, in a year, it was raining too much so they could not get out or get in. So, it was unbelievable. And we took this road. We learned a lot, like, for instance, you're never the last in a group of trucks because if you are in the middle, they cannot let you there because they cannot pass. So, you should not never be the last. And some other tricks that we learned. We always gave high rights to people because if something happened, they could help and so on. But coming to your question. So, we saw a lot of stories. One or two of them were very strong and they came out as a positive influence, like talking about the gold mining and some ecological problems and questions with the engines and so on. But we cannot say that we changed the whole story because already the country had a very strong impression that something very bad was going on. The only thing people didn't realize exactly and how and especially for us, what was very interesting, that's the main point of my work, as you can see. It's the story of these people. I even say that, I was telling to our students yesterday, these people were in the middle of nowhere with no cell phones, with no signal for TV, with no newspaper, no nothing. They had no news from their families. Their families had no news from them. So, every place we came, as you can see, people were very open to have their pictures taken and to tell their stories. They wanted to convey their stories. They wanted to share the situation they were living and which was very interesting. I also said that yesterday in the 80s there was not such ecological ideology. It was not very widespread. The question of conquering the Amazon was always a problem or a main problem in Brazil. We always felt that the Amazon wasn't really ours, that it could be taken by somewhere else, by another country, and so on, if we didn't occupy the Amazon. That was a feeling that comes from the 16th century. It's a new urge for Brazil to occupy the Amazon in a way that the country doesn't lose it. We never knew, and it was never very easy because there wasn't much money to be done there. That's why the country never really took possession of the Amazon. But this feeling was there. People were very, very proud of being there, being a pioneer. This pioneer spirit was there. These people were very proud of what they were doing, even if they were cutting the trees. Of course, nobody was proud of killing the Indians, but even the gold miners, they were saying, we are pioneers, we are conquering the Amazon. We were very careful not to judge these people. In general, we met very poor people coming from very poor situations in their background, especially from the Northeast. They were looking for a better life. They were looking for making fortune, to give a house to their family, or to feed themselves. In general, the situation of these people is so in a suffering situation. At the same time, with a very high spirit of conquering, of taking the destiny on their hands. You can see most of the pictures. They are very proud. They display a very strong feeling of we are doing something. We are conquering. We are taking our destiny on our hands. This is something that is very present in the pictures. I wanted to, you were talking about, it looks like my microphone isn't working, so let me borrow yours. Some of the distances in the map that I just wanted to draw everybody's attention. We actually have a map out here that shows all of the places where Zhuang did work. It's really impressive, the geographical distribution. There's also another map that I wanted to point out. In one of the cases in the back, I think it's case number five, dedicated to a magazine called Heali Daji. Number seven. Thank you. Case number seven. It's in the back there. It was kind of like time life. It was noted for sort of new journalism, new investigative journalism. It was active between 1966 and 1976. In 1971, Heali Daji did a big spread, a big feature on the Amazon, Amazonia featuring a lot of photographers, including some of the photographers that we have in our other cases. But it also includes a map there. And what's very interesting is that you can see that they've already sort of determined the routes before they were actually built. And actually determines the areas where they're going to do specific types of mining or specific types of agricultural activities. And a lot of this, I think it should be noted, is coming very specifically or very explicitly from a discourse created by the military regime at that time that saw the Amazon. They had this phrase that Amazon is a place without people for people without, no, a land without people for people without land, which of course is totally a lie, which is totally false. But it was this idea that Amazon was there for development, for enrichment. One of the other things that we did with that case was went through and looked at all of the advertisements that were played into this narrative. And we kind of explained that there. But I wanted to just ask you very briefly to talk about something. And I want to open it up to other questions because I want everybody to have a chance to participate. But those of you who have a program, I'd like for you to open up and I think it's on page three. I'm not going to be able to read it because I don't have my glasses, but let me find those. Can you just hold that for a second? Did I put them down? Yeah, here we are. Okay. So if you can or if you don't have a program looked on with someone. And so I'm going to actually read the whole quote. This is something that Jean wrote in the Amazonia Occupada book. And it was a quote that Ortence and I would go back and forth saying, what does this really mean? And she would say, go call Jerome. Ask him what he means. And I never got around to asking you. So I figured I'd ask you right now. And so here is what he said. Someone once told me, following SART, beauty won't save what it shows. But my instincts told me the whole time that it was urgent and necessary to go out and photograph. Photograph all that I could to return and return as often as possible, show others what my eyes had seen to somehow create a warning, even if for history, to fight the terrifying sensation of irreversibility of silent and unpunished crimes. And at the same time be capable of understanding motivations and giving voice to the anonymous characters of that saga. I think that really encapsulates really very well the whole project. But I wanted to go back to that phrase, beauty won't save what it shows. And this is this, what does this mean? What does this mean? So I'm wondering if you could tell us about it. I finally got around to it. Well, first I want to make a parenthesis. There is a lady here that said that she came and her mother is very fond of Sebastian Salgado's work. And I mentioned that because it's a good start to answer this question. Sebastian Salgado is a very important photographer and happens to be from Brazil, happened to have photographed the Serra Pelada mine and beautiful pictures. And he's being accused as every successful person in general has many people talking against him, so especially in Brazil. He's been accused of making beautiful pictures out of suffering, out of poor people, out of migrants or so on. And that's a very important question for photographers. And because we are dealing, photography is, even today I was a little bit of an emotion here when I was signing the pictures that we remain here. I was putting the data the day where the pictures were taken, they were taken like 32 years ago. And I was getting emotional because it's a profession. It's what I do. I do it every day and I did it as a living to sustain my family and so on. It's also a passion. It's also maybe a form of art. But what impresses me in photography is I am an old timer. I do appreciate much the fact that photography is a document. It's been told very much against photography today. People say photography photographs lie, photographs are fake, photographs can be manipulated and so on, so it's not a document, it's fake. And of course you can say this about the language, written language, you can say that about anything. But for me, photography we have both sides. At the same time it could be a form of expression and to reach people from the sense side. But ineditably for me it's a document. So how do you come and photograph the forest being burned? Without appropriating it from a statical point of view. It's always there, it's always there. So these things go together. So when you're doing a photograph, you could ask Sebastian Salgado, please do a terrible picture about this terrible situation. But I don't think it's the only way to look at it. And I think it's no harm if you do a beautiful play or a beautiful novel about a terrible situation. I mean you don't say that about George Armando. You don't say that about a playwright. They do it with very difficult situations and they do poetry and they do art. But with photography people somehow had this problem. And so I showed these pictures to a curator and she said, oh this reminds me this phrase of Sartre and he said beauty doesn't say what it shows. So it's kind of an alert that although we are doing our best to do some art or to touch emotion of people, still the things are going to happen. The humankind is very strange. And we have very good and very bad aspects. And so we can do all this beautiful piece of work. We can do this beautiful book. We can just do the show. And things are still going on. So that's the thing. So at this point I'd like to open it up for just a few questions. We have a lot of food here and more drinks and I know that people I imagine will be interested in that as well. But if we can take some questions or comments before we break up and return to the party. Unfortunately our mobile mic does not function. So you can either come up here or you can yell. Annie, can you project? This does work. It does work. Kind of. Kind of. The resilience in New Orleans is actually one of the largest groups of resilience in New Orleans. It's actually from Hong Kong. It was after the government-sponsored movement opening up Santa Monica Highway. And then with the World Bank put the new limitations on settlements having to be careful about environmental degradation that the sons and daughters of those people that moved to Hong Kong couldn't make a living anymore. And so they started this kind of undocumented train to the United States. New Orleans became one of the places where people from Hong Kong actually came. And so it's shown that we have one of the largest communities of people from Hong Kong living in the United States. Wow. Wow. And I actually want to just mention here that Annie Gibson is probably one of the leading specialists of resilience in the United States and the leading specialist as an academic of resilience in New Orleans. Which she wrote a very fine sound book on this topic. I also want to, and thank you for bringing this up because I also want to give a shout out to all the Brazilians that have come out tonight. So thank you for coming. Muito obrigado. Do you want to respond or do you want to keep going? Okay. She said had a question. You want to go ahead. You can have the microphone. If anybody wants to come up here to you can share the stage. I just I have to leave soon. So I'm sorry that I'm standing here. But I have a question kind of concerning politics right now in the situation in Brazil, the current situation about the future changes that are going to happen with the Bolsonaro politics. I just wanted to know how you feel about that considering that you've seen the beauty of Amazon and you've seen the destruction of Amazon. I just wanted to understand your point of view because I've never been there. I have to make a disclosure first. I'm very bad in politics. Very bad. I have very good friends that are very good in politics. So I listen to them because my vision for politics is very poor. I trust people. I believe everything will be okay. I'm an optimist and I believe in beauty. And I believe in the humankind. So I'm very bad in politics. I'm mistaken most of the time. So what we do hope is that this new government is very incompetent for these questions. We hope that they don't do what they plan because they don't feel very good. But I cannot say what they were going to do. But we hope that they are very incompetent. There is a question. Yes. Yes. Have you returned back after so many years and what you saw that made you think back about the people that are left and after so many years what's left there? It's an interesting question. I went back in 2011 with a friend who is also in the documentary. He did a huge project in the Amazon. One of his trips I did with him. Well, one main change is that the gold mining, it's much more professional these days. You have more machinery. They are bigger. They are more structured. They don't have so much of the lonely perspective anymore. So this is a huge change. Other than that, it's pretty much the same. If you fly over the Amazon, in many, many areas you can feel that it's endless. That it will never be destroyed. We human kind will never be able to destroy this. It's so huge. It's so immense. The size of the rivers, the distances. You think it's amazing but somehow you think we can't destroy it. The only problem is when you see to the satellite photos, then you see that it's coming. It's coming. It's layer by layer. It's coming from the south, from Hondonia and from the main roads. It's somehow hurting and it's bleeding. But still when you go there, you're still amazed by the size. It's immense. It's immense. And I think somehow that feeling, it's part of the reason why we are destroying the Amazon. Because it feels so immense. It feels so long, so far away, so undestructible. Is that the word? Indestructible. Undestructible. That somehow you have this feeling, oh I do just a little bit harm here. It won't hurt. So I think somehow this is in the background of Brazilian that we can use it. We can do it there. But the whole thing is almost the same. You don't see much less of the religious people. There is much resistance for that. You see much less of known contact indigenous people. And you see more of medium-sized cities. And you see some more roads. But other than that, it's pretty much the same. People opening small farms and so on. If you get a chance to use the tablet and the program that Felipe used, there are, if you click the map icon, there are satellite photos of what that area that the photo was taken in looks like now. And you can see all the destruction and kind of the myths, the gaps in the forest. It's a question for you. The first is, since your work displayed more of the humanity of the getting paid, did you feel it was criticized for showing a different image than what mainstream media was showing at the time? The second is, did you get a chance to interact with indigenous people? Good question about the getting paid. Well, number one, I didn't publish this work at that time. And I didn't do a large exhibition. So these pictures were seen much more now than at that time. But what I feel is that two things on one hand, people don't really look to things the way we think. People already have something in their minds. So when they look at something, they see what they want. It's strange. So if people didn't like getting paid, they would think that pictures are great because they show enemy of nature and full body and so on. And if people had more of a human vision, they would see that on the pictures. I think somehow it's the way I work. I don't like much this idea of artists. So I think we give too much importance to art and artists and everything that became so much of it. And I think everybody has an art feeling it at his heart. And eventually everybody can do art in some way. I don't really do a big thing about it. And as a photojournalist that I was for many, many years, now my work is literally changing more into a self-expression. I always consider myself an instrument of these people that want their pictures taken. I always feel that I am at service of nature, of history, of these people. So I think at least I had this experience with us the other day. We were visiting a place and she was amazed by the fact that I took a picture of a man in the older airport. Do you want to... No, you say. No, please. Okay. Because she explains so well the way I work. Well, I was amazed because we went to Lakefront Airport. If you've never been there, you have to go there. It's an art deco jewel and it still works and it's half empty and only in New Orleans. It's pristine. It was fairly recently restored, I think. So anyway, we entered. The facade is beautiful. And Joao took pictures and things and there was a chef walking in this empty kind of entry hallway. And they immediately connected. He was such a quintessential New Orleans figure. Very welcoming, a tall black man who just spoke beautifully, very articulate, very friendly. Welcoming us to the place. Very proud that he was the chef of this place and he immediately connected with Joao. And they began this kind of connection and kept talking. You kept photographing him. He allowed him to photograph him without a question as to what he was doing with the photographs. For all he knew, this would be plastered all over the internet. He just didn't know. But you two established a very intimate connection. Thank you. I wanted to tell him because she described so well. It's more like I made him feel that he was also helping me to take his picture. He was also doing the picture. So I was trained in New York City. I was a young student there. I was taking pictures in the street. And New York is not the easiest place to photograph. So I had to develop a way of intuition about who is open to be photographed and how to deal with unknown people. So I've been training this all my life. I do a lot of meditation and so I try to clean my mind and to be able to understand people and let them use my capacity as a photographer to help and have their own pictures taken. So actually I don't consider my work mine. Many times I've been asked to publish the series of the Carnival Mask. Can we use this as a reminder or a small thing or as a token? I say, yes, go ahead. These pictures are not mine. Of course, if somebody wants to buy my pictures I sell because I make a living out of that, which is quite surprising because when I started you wouldn't make a living out of selling pictures. But so I'll have to answer the lady. But anyway, that's the way I work. And I think if you are really open, if you are really open to people, truth comes. And even our friend Lydia Schwartz in the video, she talks about this. It's very easy to point a villain or to make a hero. It's very difficult to work in between because everybody has some of both. So this young boy burning the forest, he's a like 11 year old boy and probably his father asked him to burn the part of the forest that they are putting down to plant something to eat. So I was interviewed in Brazilian television, they came to me and they asked, oh please tell us who is destroying the Amazon as if I could point these people as... And I got fed up of that and I said, we are destroying the Amazon. The Brazilians, the humankind, because we keep buying the woods. We keep eating hamburgers so we need more cattle to raise and we need more soybean and we are endless. We will destroy everything if we can. So I think that this work has this characteristic of not judging people but trying to convey their stories. I know that there was just one more question about the indigenous question and then we're going to have to wrap it up. She was asking if you didn't work with indigenous. Yes, I did connect with some indigenous people but I never lived with them. I was only telling some of the stories. We had this very strong story about the yellow money that was shot the very first time he saw a white man. He was in a tree and the guinea pig came by and yes, it's right there. It's a small story that tells the whole story of the yellow money Indians. It's in the movie or in the documentary. I also came to the Uruguayans, Indian in Frontonia and they had reacted. They had killed the gold miners. They were very proud of that. So we went there and I stayed a few days there. I took some pictures. I also talked about that. So somehow I got some examples of the situation of the Indians but I never really belonged or stayed longer. I don't speak and I'm not a specialist. I'm sure we could go on for a lot longer. We have a whole table of food and we have more drinks and I want to also have an opportunity for people to come up and have private conversations or more individualized conversations with João but I also want to just thank everybody for coming out today. It was a wonderful group of people. So thank you again and thank you João. Of course it was my honor and privilege to be here to have my pictures of the collection and I really want to thank you because he worked a whole year under this exhibition. He's a hero. Remember the exhibit is going to be up through August. So you have plenty of time and take a look at the glass cases. There's a lot of great information there.