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Terra Vermelha. By Tommaso Protti.
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Photographs by Tommaso Protti
Void, Athens, 2023. 224 pp., 8¼x11".
If you are like most photo-eye readers, you have a nagging sense that the Amazon rainforest is endangered. News outlets regularly report on a barrage of development threats, including logging, ranching, fires, roads, extinction, lost languages, and creeping monoculture. Whew, did I miss anything? The rainforest is under fire, literally. But what exactly does that look like? Is it heavy equipment? Stacks of timber? Indigenous kids in NFL jerseys? Smartphone screenshots viewed in a distant coffee shop?
Italian photographer Tommaso Protti devoted ten years to exploring these questions. He travelled thousands of miles across the Brazilian Amazon, photographing prolifically, often in the company of journalist Sam Cowie and local fixers. As he explains in the introduction, his efforts kicked into high gear with the 2018 election of Jair Bolsonaro. “I felt that the slow-motion social and environmental breakdown I had seen in the previous years was about to get worse.” An accurate prediction, as it turned out.
Protti’s alarming findings are compiled in the recent book Terra Vermelha. The title — Red Land — takes its name from the iron-rich soil exposed by cleared rainforest, but Protti’s subjects extend far beyond devegetated landscapes. His book is a deep dive into the modern human condition, viewed through the lens of communities and villages in the Amazon. In recent decades, these places have endured rapid change and stress. Terra Vermelha doesn’t spend much time in the natural forest, nor does it need to. Wounded communities tell the whole story, mirroring and symbolizing the ongoing environmental carnage. Cultural scars manifest in Protti’s pictures as visual PTSD.
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Photographically speaking, this is a journalistic exposé in classic tradition. Shooting in good ol’ monochrome, Protti made his way through Brazil’s disparate communities, sourcing inroads, befriending potential leads, and trusting his instincts to both generate pictures and keep him in one piece. His photos reveal intimate access into a variety of situations. The photos begin with overviews of the broken forest, then progress to shacks, stumpage, meals, kids, truckers, lovers, and more. We see native gatherings, vice squads, industrial sites, and domestic scenes. Like weeds moving into cleared acreage, missionaries and multinationals are a constant invasive presence. Protti treats everything with even-handed aplomb. Most subject are shot with flash and most situations are nocturnal. These factors combine to lend the book a dramatic film noir flavor.
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Terra Vermelha is dense with images, all with solid reproductions and center-weighted tonality (reminiscent of Soth’s Songbook). Those features would be enough to carry it, but there are a few nice perks that make it even better. Void’s design has an exposed-spine binding with paper dust jacket. When opened to just about any spread, it lays flat on a table, allowing full visual access to photos across the gutter. Brief sections of white pages and portraits keep the book’s dark edge from dominating too much. Void also had some fun with Protti’s first-person text. It spills like a rubber tree across the end pages in a series of oddly spaced columns.
These are nice design treats, but the book’s most innovative and interesting aspect is the caption index. It’s located in the back of the book as usual, but cleverly disguised as nota roja tabloid headlines. Words blare in breathless all-cap warnings: JAMAXIM FOREST FACES BURNING AND DESTRUCTION…IN THE SEARCH FOR ILLEGAL LOGGERS…VULTURES IN THE PORT OF MANAUS.
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The blurbs are mixed with thumbnail versions of interior photos, and multicolored ink. If the combination is not very useful as a practical index, that’s no matter. This section is explosive and fun, and it gets the point across in a way that Protti’s photographs cannot. The index puts an exclamation point on the book’s dystopian mood. That nagging sense I mentioned earlier, that the Amazon rainforest is endangered? By the time you finish this book, it will be flashing red alert. Terra vermhelha indeed. The lungs of the planet are in rough shape. Time for a deep breath of fresh photography.
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