A Nukak girl. In 1988 the Nukak began to have contact with the outside world for the first time. Numerous diseases resulting from this contact and the arrival of the conflict in their territory has reduced their number to only 500 today. They are a nomadic people, constantly on the move through the jungle, and the strong lines of their face painting (using achiote) serve as armour that helps them to press on through the dense forest, without cease. Guaviare, Colombia.
An Embera lady with her entire body painted black with 'jagua'. Sometimes the Embera women cover their whole body with the same paint they use to paint symbols and figures, in order to alleviate mosquito bites or help cure skin irritations. Chocó, Colombia.
Cubean lady with here face painted ready to go out to the 'chagra' or crops of yucca in the jungle where they cultivate their main food source. The paint, 'carayuru', is made from the boiling down of a certain type of leaf until it forms a dry red paste. In order for this paste to stick, chilren are made to inhale chilli powder through their noses when young, until their skin starts to produce natural grease. Vaupés, Colombia.
Yucuna tribesmen dressed for the 'Baile del Muñeco' or 'Puppet Dance'. Amazon, Colombia.
Nukak girl, Guaviare, Colombia. The Nukak are a nomadic jungle people who first made contact with the outside world in 1988. Since then their numbers have been ravaged by contact with western dieseases, and combined with persecution from the guerrilla who now occupy their land, they number less than 500 and are in danger of extinction.
Nukak girl. The Nukak are a nomadic jungle people who first made contact with the outside world in 1988. Since then their numbers have been ravaged by contact with western dieseases, and combined with persecution from the guerrilla who now occupy their land, they number less than 500 and are in danger of extinction.
A young Wayuu girl in La Guajira, Colombia. The female Wayuu traditionally paint spirals and other figures on their faces when young to represent the way they are feeling and the stage of life they are in. The spirals, a commonly chosen theme, represent the circle of life and the menstrual cycle as the woman passes through puberty into womanhood. As they get older and marry, the woman change to wearing inelegant blotches of the same paint on their faces in order to make them less attractive to other men.
An Embera lady with her entire body painted black with 'jagua'. Sometimes the Embera women cover their whole body with this same paint that they use to paint symbols and figures, in order to alleviate mosquito bites or help cure skin irritations. Normally it takes about 24 hours after applying for it to achieve it's full dark colour. Chocó, Colombia.
A Wounaan mother from the Chocó, Colombia, paints her daughter with 'jagua' and a form of wooden fork with three prongs which helps to draw these parallel lines.
Tattoed Embera Man, Chocó, Colombia. The Embera traditionally paint their faces and bodies with 'jagua', the juice squeezed from the rind of a jungle fruit. However outside culture has already made deep inroads into their own, and many of the young generation are now abandoning their own traditions in favour of western ones, even this man, who is the son of the 'jaibaná', the village's spiritual leader.
Two Embera friends giggle on a hammock. Although in many areas it has ceased to be a daily custom, Embera children still regularly like to be painted for fun. The girl on the left has the figure of the boa snake, which is usually worn for fiestas and celebrations, and the girl on the right has a more abstract geometric pattern, which is a curative figure usually used for healing. Chocó, Colombia.
A Wounaan boy from the Chocó, Colombia, painted with the figure of the bear, which endows strength and courage to those that wear it. The paint, extracted from the zest of the jagua fruit, is applied using a form of wooden fork, which allows the drawing of three parallel lines at a time.
Nukak mother and child, Guaviare, Colombia. The Nukak are a nomadic jungle people who first made contact with the outside world in 1988. Since then their culture has changed fast, facing pressures from all sides.
In the arid deserts in the north, Wayuu women use a natural form of sun protection. First they apply a base layer of 'cebo' to their face, a form of boiled goat fat, and then they apply a layer of black powder which are the spores of a fungus found in the desert. La Guajira, Colombia.
A young Cubean painted with 'carayurú'. On her forehead she has a sunrise and rainbow which represent the change from childhood through puberty into womanhood. The paint, 'carayuru', is made from the boiling down of a certain type of leaf until it forms a dry red paste. In order for this paste to stick, chilren are made to inhale chilli powder through their noses when young, until their skin starts to produce natural grease. Vaupés, Colombia.
An Embera girl painted with 'jagua' in the figure of the Boa snake. Chocó, Colombia.
Nukak mother and baby, Guaviare, Colombia. The Nukak are a nomadic jungle people who first made contact with the outside world in 1988. Since then their culture has changed fast, facing pressures from all sides.
A displaced Wounaan girl who along with her family had to leave the Pacific jungles of Choco to live in a poor neighbourhood in the south of Bogotá. Armed groups wanted her village to grow coca instead of traditional crops, but her father, the governor of the village refused, and so they all had to leave. She now has little occasion to dress up in traditional style (left).
Two Yucuna men dressed up in suits with Orejones (Big Ears) masks for the Baile del Muñeco (Puppet Dance) which they celebrate every february to give thanks for the abundance of the chotaduro fruit. All exposed skin, hands and feet, is painted black as well to invoke a death so that they can get in touch with their ancestors in the spirit world.
A Yucuna tribesman shows off his suit and Tori mask for the 'Baile del Muñeco' or Puppet Dance, a celebration every february of the abundance of the chontaduro fruit. Amazon, Colombia.
"The Way We Are Now," began with a photo I saw in an exhibition taken in 1908 by British anthropologist Thomas Whiffen. It shows a group of Okaina girls in the Colombian Amazon standing in a line with their bodies painted (below).
- In spite of cameras becoming ever more ubiquitous, this photo over a hundred years old appeared to be the last visual evidence of an art that disappeared completely over the following years. This struck me as extremely sad and I felt an urgency to investigate to what extent body and face-painting does or doesn't still go on throughout Colombia's indigenous tribes today, and create a visual record before it is all gone forever.
My hope was to capture an honest document of how things are now, avoiding romanticism and not omitting the digital watches, wellington boots and Barcelona FC football shirts. I wanted to capture my subjects in a dignified way, rather than in the anthropological way in which the indigenous are typically portrayed, so that in 100 years time there exists a high quality record of how things were.
Colombia is a large country, the size of France and Spain put together, and 65% of it's surface area is rainforest comprising a large part of the Amazon jungle. However, different to it's Amazonian neighbours, Colombia has been embroiled in an internal conflict for nearly five decades, which has led it's indigenous groups down an accelerated evolutionary path, albeit for the worse. With the guerrilla tending to reside in the jungle and typically being quite violent towards indigenous tribes, these people have suffered a whole host of traumas over the years and in the process have suffered a rapid loss of their culture.
Whereas for example in Brazil photographers have been able to jump on a boat-plane out to the middle of the jungle to photograph remote communities without any serious safety concerns, in Colombia the only photographers in the jungle for the last few decades have been war correspondants who have very different photographic agendas to a portrait photographer. So whilst Colombia's indigenous people have probably undergone much more rapid change than their neighbours, at the same time these changes have been barely recorded, leaving a large hole in the country's visual history.
On the one hand this project is a celebration of the beauty of the ancestral arts which have been lucky enough to survive, but on the other hand it is perhaps the dismantling of the romantic visions that the world has of indigenous people, as "innocent" and "untouched by us". It provokes us to wonder that if even the remotest tribes in the Amazon jungle are ceding readily to western culture, including those who were unknown to the outside world until 1988, such as the Nukak, then surely there is little hope that any tribe on the planet can protect it's culture.
Nowadays almost all indigenous people in the Colombian jungle, no matter how remote, wear western clothes and trainers, cheap copies of designer brands such as Nike, Diesel, Gucci, Prada, Armani, most likely all made in China, and I feel strongly that what you see here is a proxy for how communities are evolving around the world in general. It is a generic story of cultural change, of globalisation, of homogenisation. Everywhere different peoples seem to be slowly turning away from their traditional ways of dressing in favour of wearing the same copies of the same western labels. It is an apparently unstoppable trend towards global uniformity, and one imagines that at this rate soon the Masai Mara in Kenya, the Nukak in Colombia, and the Khampas in Tibet are all going to end up looking the same.
To realise the project I travelled solo with 45 kilos of camera equipment. All photos are shot on location with natural light.
- Piers Calvert
www.pierscalvert.com
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