This photographic publication documents the ecological and human devastation caused by the construction of the Belo Monte dam in the Amazon.
In April 2013, the Brazilian artist Caio Reisewitz had the opportunity to
study the city of Altamira: the disorderly growth, the devastation of the
forest, and the neglect of the indigenous community in the wake of the
construction of the Belo Monte Hydroelectric Power Plant. He returned to
Altamira in April 2018 to photograph the environmental impact after the
construction of the dams. His new photographic book tells about this
story. When the Belo Monte hydro power plant, which is being constructed
in the Amazon basin, begins to operate at full capacity, the landscapes
will be mostly submerged. The polemic construction project of a dam on the
Xingu River, in the state of Pará, Brazil, has dramatically altered the
natural landscape impacting the flora and fauna of the region, and also
causing major social conflicts, involving above all indigenous and
riverside communities, displaced by the mounting pressure
stemming from the sharp population growth. It was precisely the
perspective of making an on-site visit to observe this conflict-ridden
territory—be it the Amazon biome now marked by a vast engineering work, or
the local population with the migrants attracted by the sudden offer of
jobs and circulation of money—which impelled the artist Caio Reisewitz to
visit such a difficult-to-access region for the first time in 2013 and
again in 2018.
Caio Reisewitz (born 1967 in São Paulo, where he lives and works) is one of Brazil's leading contemporary photographer. The register of a high-speed changing nature
is one of the subjects that articulates Reisewitz's photographic
work.
In this sense, his images are placed in a tradition in which photographic
means are witnesses and capture ephemeral realities. The activity of man
on the planet, and in certain areas in particular, radically modifies the
appearance of the landscape.
His photographs, that are mostly large format, are characterized by their
frontality and by a spectacular clarity that shows an exuberant nature and
a unreal utopian beauty. On one occasion he himself commented: “sometimes
these images don't seem real, utopian they are, but they are true, it is
the pure reality.”
