Claudia Andujar

Claudia Andujar , actually Claudine Haas (born June 22, 1931 in Neuchâtel , Switzerland ) is a Swiss-Brazilian photographer, photo artist and human rights activist. She devotes her life to photography and the protection of the Yanomami Indians in Brazil .

Life

Claudia Andujar comes from a Jewish family on her father's side and spent her childhood in Romanian Transylvania and Hungary ; her father and most of the relatives on her father's side were murdered in 1944 in Dachau concentration camp , her mother fled to Switzerland, where she later fled, from there to the USA in 1945 to an uncle, from there to Brazil, where Claudia later succeeded. In the USA she studied human sciences at Hunter College in New York . During her stay in New York , MoMA became interested in her pictures and made it possible for her to take a photo series in the magazine “Look” and to include some of her photos in their photo inventory. She also worked for the magazine "Life" and the " New York Times ".

She has lived in Brazil since 1955. Since she didn't speak Portuguese at first, the camera was her way of communicating with people. She worked as an English teacher for a while to keep her head above water.

In 1956 she traveled to an indigenous people for the first time, whom she photographed: the Karajá people , where she lived for a few weeks.

In the 1960s she began taking photographs of the marches of the Catholic reaction just before the military coup against President João Goulart . Between 1977 and 1978, the military dictatorship forbade her to work for a left-wing magazine and to publish pictures and photographs.

The 1970s were also characterized by landscape photographs in the state of Roraima and the Amazon region, as well as in the well-known Rua Direita in São Paulo , where she photographed passers-by sitting on the street. Until 1971 she was the photo editor of the Brazilian magazine “Realidade”, which was later banned by the military dictatorship.

In 2007 Andujar took part in the São Paulo Art Biennale . The cultural center in Brumadinho dedicated its own pavilion, the Galeria Claudia Andujar , to her in November 2015 .

In 2017, the first exhibition "Tomorrow must not be yesterday", which shows an excerpt of her entire oeuvre in Europe, took place in the Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt am Main .

Andujar had a close friendship with the star architect Lina Bo Bardi . She was married twice, including a long time with an American photographer.

Claudia Andujar is a reminder for the environment, the rights of indigenous peoples, especially in Brazil, and with her work would also like to point out the dangers for Brazil in the present.

Her oeuvre includes around 60,000 photographs that are in various photo departments in large and well-known museums and galleries, such as the George Eastman House .

Claudia Andujar lives and works in São Paulo.

The Brazilian documentary “A estrangeira” (The Foreigner) traces her way from Europe to Brazil.

Claudia Andujar and the Yanomami people

Since the 1970s she has been taking intensive photographs of one of the most important indigenous peoples in Brazil, the Yanomami Indians. There she campaigned for their protection and vaccination and created extensive photo series of the residents of various villages, which would later provide the basis for exhibitions. Her stay with the Yanomamis was from 1971 to 1978 until the military government expelled her. She worked mainly with the Yanomamis on the Rio Catrimani, a tributary of the Rio Branco .

In 1978 she and others founded the aid organization "Comissão pela criação de parque Yanomami", which campaigned for the establishment of a park to protect this people and the associated nature. The organization was later renamed "Pro Yanomami".

With her series "Marcados" (the marked ones), which came about as part of the vaccination campaign in the 1980s, she created black and white portraits of the indigenous people for their vaccination records. These later became the most famous and intimate photos ever taken of this people. At the same time, the numbers that the indigenous peoples were given for lack of their names and that they wear on chains around their necks in the photos so that they could be recognized, remind of the numbering of the prisoners in the German concentration camps before they were murdered. Against this background, Andujar himself described her photos as follows: “For me they were the ones marked for death. What I tried to do with the Yanomami was to mark them for life, for survival. "

The fight for the Yanomami was successful for the ethnic group and the artist: Thanks to the artist's long-term struggle, President Fernando Collor de Mello declared an area of ​​9.6 million hectares a protected area for the Yanomamis in 1991.

Over the years she has had several solo exhibitions of her pictures, for example in São Paulo, Recife , Madrid and Buenos Aires .

Awards (selection)

• 2000: Lannan Foundation's Cultural Freedom Prize
• 2008: Honored by the Brazilian Ministry of Culture for her artistic and cultural merits
• 2018: Goethe Medal

Web links

• Claudia Andujar in Google Arts & Culture
• Entries in Arthistoricum.net

swell

• Claudia Andujar: Marcados. Malba, 2016, accessed November 30, 2017 (European Spanish). 
• Museum of Modern Art (Ed.): Claudia Andujar. Tomorrow cannot be yesterday . Frankfurt am Main February 16, 2017 (press release on the exhibition at MMK Frankfurt am Main).
• Gerhard Bissell , Andujar, Claudia , in: Allgemeine Künstlerlexikon , supplement 1, Saur, Munich 2005, from p. 349.
• Susanne Gaensheimer, Peter Gorschlüter, Carolin Köchling, Museum für Moderne Kunst (ed.): Claudia Andujar: Tomorrow must not be yesterday - tomorrow must not be like yesterday . Kerber Verlag, Bielefeld 2017, ISBN 978-3-7356-0328-9 (catalog for the exhibition of the same name at the Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt am Main, 2017).
• Frank Steinhofer: Claudia Andujar - The Art of Humanity . In: DARE magazine . December 11, 2015 ( daremag.de [accessed November 30, 2017]).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Inhotim Inaugura Galeria Claudia Andujar. In: org.br. Inhotim, November 11, 2015, accessed January 26, 2019 (Brazilian Portuguese).