Claudia Andujar

The Fondation Cartier has been supporting the Yanomami and Andujar's work for two decades. In 2020, the exhibition The Yanomami Struggle, conceived by Thyago Nogueira for the Instituto Moreira Salles in Brazil, presented over 300 of her photographs, many never before shown, along with an audiovisual installation, drawings created by Yanomami artists, and historical documents. This exhibition clearly showed the two principal aspects of Andujar's work, the aesthetic and the political, as well as revealing the massive contribution she has made to photographic art and the essential role she plays in the defence of the rights of the Yanomami, and the forest that they call home. The exhibition was also notably presented at the Milan Triennale in Italy, and an updated, expanded version was presented at The Shed in New York City in 2023.

After spending her childhood in Transylvania, Andujar fled with her mother to Switzerland during the Second World War to escape Nazi persecution in Eastern Europe. Her father was a Hungarian Jew who was deported to Dachau, where he was exterminated, along with most of the members of her family. After the war, Andujar immigrated to the United States, then settled permanently in Brazil in 1955, where she began her career as a photojournalist. She first encountered the Yanomami, an indigenous people, in 1971 when she was doing a reportage on the Amazon for the magazine Realidade. Fascinated, she began an in-depth photographic project on the world of the Yanomami, sponsored by a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation. Her approach was notably different from the documentary style of her contemporaries. For instance, she experimented with a variety of techniques in order to convey what she could perceive of the shamanic experience. She also did a number of black-and-white portraits. At the same time, and in order to better understand their culture, she offered the Yanomami the opportunity to represent their metaphysical universe themselves, furnishing them with paper, pens and felt-tips.