The Amazon Matters.
LAST WILDEST PLACE is a decade-long, ongoing project based on a simple fact: The Amazon Matters. Working regularly with several small NGOs, I have been photographing this globally critical landscape in the face of the many and constantly evolving threats to the unique social, cultural, and environmental fabric of this place.
At over a billion acres, the Amazon Basin is bigger than the next two largest tropical forests combined. It alone accounts for half the planet’s remaining rainforest, 30% of all terrestrial species, 20% of our world’s freshwater, and 20% of the global oxygen. It provides climate stability for the entire planet and the carbon stored in its forests—and released by its deforestation—affects us all.
Within the Amazon, the Purús/Manu region in southeastern Peru is one of the most remote and inaccessible, where still-intact and uniquely biodiverse ecosystems provide sustenance for settled indigenous communities and is home to perhaps the highest concentration of isolated “uncontacted” tribes on Earth. While still largely undeveloped, this last wildest place is increasingly threatened by extractive activities including logging, illegal and unregulated gold mining (Peru is the largest gold producer in South America and 6th or 7th in the world), coca farms and processing, land trafficking, oil and gas development, cattle grazing, agricultural expansion, Christian missionaries, and the legal and illegal road construction projects that open access to previously inaccessible forests with devastating—often irrevocable—impacts on the ecosystems and all who depend on them.
I first visited the Upper Amazon in 2013 and have returned over a dozen times spending more than a year in total in the jungle. The pandemic, which limited legitimate expeditions as well as enforcement patrols, left the region especially vulnerable to increased illegal activity. Out of respect for the communities, many remote and with limited healthcare and even more limited immunity to outside diseases, we halted visits during the height of the Pandemic and continue to be cautious. Now, as the region is reopening slowly and the extent of the increase in unregulated and illegal activities is made clear, raising awareness is more critical than ever.
Most recently, Last Wildest Place has been recognized as a finalist in three categories in the 2024 Muse International Awards (Photojournalism, Documentary, and B&W (Photojournalism)), and as a ‘Remarkable Artwork’ at the 2022 Siena International Photo Awards in Siena, Italy in the Storyboard Category. In 2020, it was awarded first place in the ZEKE Award for Documentary Photography which includes publication in ZEKE Magazine and exhibitions at Photoville in New York, Bridge Gallery in Cambridge, MA, South Orange Performing Arts Center in South Orange, NJ, and several other locations. And in 2014, Last Wildest Place was awarded the Jonny Copp award and early work was exhibited at Adventure Film Festival in Boulder, CO in 2016.
Last Wildest Place is actively being presented and shared in festivals, at universities, and through photography organizations around the world.
A NOTE ON AUTHORSHIP AND REPRESENTATION:
As a white male photojournalist living in the settler-colonized United States it is my responsibility to be aware of the dynamics that define my work and benefit me personally. While I have spent a lot of time in the Alto Purús / Manu region and tried to get to know it for what it is and not what I want it to be, it is not my home place. I don’t have family or ancestors or a cultural history there. In fact, my most obvious connection is that it is my people who drive much of the bad behavior I’m most compelled to help fight against.
But as I write in the beginning below, The Amazon matters. The pressures on it—the attacks on the survival of the people who live there and the nature that they rely on—come largely from countries like mine. The wood we build things with, the oil that fuels our cars, the gold that enables our technology, the beef in our burgers, and coke in our noses are all markets we’ve created. And so the responsibility to do something about it is also ours. I am not trying to speak for the communities there. They have a voice. I offer to help amplify it when it helps, but my work instead focuses on bringing to light the issues, bringing to life the amazing diversity of people and nature there (to inspire outsiders like me), and celebrating as an ally the good work there and the efforts we can all support—must support—if we care.
This opportunity still comes from my privilege and it isn’t a perfect approach. Even now after decades of doing this work I am learning. I welcome conversation on this all.