Pantanal: Photo exhibition in SP highlights water and fire – 03/06/2024 – Environment

Reddish aquatic plants in the Mangabal ebb, in Corumbá (MS), dominate the lower half of Luciano Candisani’s photograph, displayed on a panel measuring 2.25 m by 1.5 m. At the top, there is an immensity of swampy waters and the sky covered in clouds, alternating shades of blue and white.

Two steps further, we see another image of the same size, but darker in every way. In Lalo de Almeida’s photo, black and gray dominate the calcined terrain in Barão de Melgaço (MT), also in the Pantanal. Right in the center, a dead deer, one of the millions of animals affected by the fires that devastated the region in 2020.

The 2 photos are among the 80 that make up the exhibition “Água Pantanal Fogo”, which opens to the public this Thursday (7), at 7pm, at the Instituto Tomie Ohtake, in São Paulo.

There are 40 images by Candisani, a contributor to National Geographic magazine, who documented the exuberant life present in the region’s rivers, lakes and ebbs from 2012 to 2021. And another 40 by Almeida, photojournalist at Sheetwhich recorded the killing of vegetation and animals by fire in the second half of 2020.

“There is horror and wonder, and I knew I couldn’t weigh in one way or the other”, says Eder Chiodetto, curator of the exhibition that highlights the work of two names dedicated to long-term documentary photography projects.

“Continuing the trend we are in, scientists say, the path is the desertification of the Pantanal. But if I focused on this fatalistic tone, it could sound like ‘he died, what a shame’. On the other hand, the opposite path might seem jingoistic. The question was to balance the two discourses, the death drive and the life drive.”

Thus, tragic images alternate throughout the exhibition with sublime visions, generating unlikely dialogues in the first room of Tomie Ohtake’s mezzanine.

Almeida remembers two moments in which he felt especially impacted during the four trips he made to the Pantanal during that period, both presented in the exhibition.

The first happened on the initial trip, in August 2020, when he and Fabiano Maisonnave, then a reporter for Sheetdecided to take the road from Cuiabá towards the São Francisco de Perigara farm, in Barão de Melgaço.

“We started to see dead animals and some injured ones, which looked like zombies. There was no longer any fire, everything was devastated. Further on, we reached a road, which gave access to the farm, and, suddenly, we saw the dead deer. Close to it , there was the baby, stunned. And, a few meters away, about 20 capuchin monkeys, all charred.”

For more than three decades in Sheet and accustomed to reporting in the Amazon, Almeida draws attention to the differences between the fires in the two biomes.

“In the Amazon, normally, the forest is deforested, then there is a wait for the area to become drier and only then they set fire. When deforestation happens, most of the animals leave, few die in the midst of burned. In the pantanal, no, the number of dead animals was frightening.”

According to a study conducted by scientists from Inpe (National Institute for Space Research), the high-intensity fires that hit the region in 2020 burned an area of ​​44,998 square kilometers, which represents just over 30% of the biome’s territory in the portion Brazilian.

The second episode that made a strong impression on Almeida occurred on his last trip, in October 2020, when he and Maisonnave were at the Santa Tereza farm, in the Serra do Amolar region, in Corumbá.

“The farm manager said he would take me to a point where the fire had burned more intensely. In that place, the ground was covered in very light ash, as if it had snowed. It was there that we saw the charred howler monkey, which looked like a figure human crawling to escape the flames.”

The photo of the calcined monkey became the main symbol of the tragedy, and the series about the swamp in ashes earned Almeida the win in the Environment category of the World Press Photo, the most prestigious photojournalism award in the world, in 2021.

Graduated in oceanography and dedicated to recording different forms of life in fresh and salt waters for more than 30 years, Candisani faced challenges of a different order in his forays into the region. “Although it is one of the largest floodplains in the world, water has been a secondary element in photos of the Pantanal. We see more images of cattle dogs, macaws, jaguars… The murky waters are the great difficulty for underwater photos”, he says.

Therefore, he carries out expeditions to specific points, such as springs, where the waters are more crystal clear. Furthermore, he prioritizes the period between April and June, when the rains are less frequent and the water starts to flow back into the rivers – this is the low water season.

Candisani lists examples of places he photographed that have undergone worrying transformations. “Na Vazante do Castelo [em Corumbá], where I took most of the underwater photos of alligators, today there is no water. At this same time of year, in 2011, it was about 3 m deep.”

Through Almeida’s denunciatory photos and images of Candisani’s vibrant nature, “Água Pantanal Fogo” gains, in the curator’s words, the status of “manifesto-exhibition”.