In Latin America’s Rich
Lands, Poor People
By Evelyn Nieves Aug. 26, 2015 Aug. 26, 2015 Comment
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There it was, the mighty Amazon, biggest jungle on earth, more wondrous than even Sir David Attenborough could convey. And it was dying.
It was worse than Gustavo Jononovich had expected. Mr. Jononovich, a freelance photographer from Buenos Aires, had traveled in 2008 to Santarém, Brazil, in the heart of the Amazon, to document how ramped-up soy production was affecting life in the rain forest. But what he saw was shocking, “a sea of useless dry land that was once a jungle.”
The stark black-and-white images he made in Santarém — aerials of denuded land, ravaged landscapes, a lone tree, bending in the wind, where a forest patch once stood — reflect the horror he experienced. By documenting deforestation, he hoped to show that the Amazon, which produces about a fifth of the world’s oxygen and one in 10 known species on earth, remained in danger, despite receding from the headlines.
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A displaced family from the rural outskirts of Santarém, Brazil. 2008.Credit Gustavo Jononovich
His project wasn’t done, though. That desiccated swath of former forest he saw led Mr. Jononovich to reflect on what humans are doing to the planet, to what end.
“I became interested in the way that our consumption of natural resources and energy in order to maintain our living habits and needs is affecting the environment and people’s lives,” he said.
For the next five years, Mr. Jononovich traveled through seven countries in South America, exploring the exploitation of natural resources and its consequences in Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Peru, Venezuela, Chile and Bolivia. His project, “Richland,” which will be a book, is an in-your-face examination of the shortsighted way people take what they want from the planet, wrecking the environment and wreaking havoc on the health and well-being of communities.
“Richland refers to the riches of the Latin American soil in terms of natural resources’ abundance,” he said. “It’s a pretty ironic name. Latin American countries share the same history of degradation, and natural resources in the region are both a blessing and a curse.”
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Anthony, 11, who had birth defects, in the river of a community affected by oil pollution. Orellana, Ecuador. 2011.Credit Gustavo Jononovich
In every country he traveled to, Mr. Jononovich trained his camera on a single emblematic issue.
In La Oroya, Peru, a lead-mining town high in the Andes (deemed one of the world’s 10 most-polluted places by the Blacksmith Institute, a New York-based environmental group), he examined life around a paradox, a giant copper and lead smelter run by a United States-based company that provides the community with its livelihood but is also poisoning it.
“La Oroya is a small place,” he said, “you can see the smelter’s smokestack all the time. It’s huge and located just in front of the town.” Virtually all of the children in La Oroya have high levels of lead in their blood, the soil in the city and surroundings have been contaminated and the hills around the smelter have been reduced to a barren desert by sulfur dioxide emissions.
The tension poor residents in resource-rich societies confront — their need to make a living versus their health and the well-being of their environment — plays out repeatedly in “Richland.”
In Venezuela, Mr. Jononovich documented the illegal diamond and gold trade in Bolivar, where about 200,000 miners risk their lives and endure extreme living conditions in order to extract one nugget that might change their lives forever. In Ecuador, he visited the Oriente, or “Rainforest Chernobyl,” an area in the Ecuadorean Amazon reeling from the environmental devastation caused by more than three decades of oil drilling by Texaco. To cut costs, Texaco (now run by Chevron) used substandard extraction technology, leading to extreme pollution in both the air and water. What he saw up close was people with cancer, children with birth defects.
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Patagonia, Chile. 2012.Credit Gustavo Jononovich
Finally, in the last year of documenting “Richland,” in 2012, Mr. Jononovich ventured to Bolivia’s Uyuni Salt Desert, home to at least half of the world’s reserves of lithium, in demand now more than ever as it powers cellphones, laptops and hybrid cars. Then he traveled throughout Chile and Argentina to follow the construction of dams in Patagonia and examine the importance of water and our need and dependence on electricity.
His images, which have won grants and awards and have been exhibited in several shows, are not pretty, which of course is the point.
“In the name of progress,” he said, “we drill the earth, we suck the oil that’s beneath, we move mountains, dry out rivers. This thought is the one that compelled me to do this project. I tell the consequences of the way in which we live, which is not compatible with our planet earth. It seems to work, but for how long?”
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Correction: August 26, 2015
An earlier version of the slideshow incorrectly spelled the Santarém region in Brazil. The current slideshow reflects this change.
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