Blue Notebook – Claudia Andujar The Yanomami Struggle

Claudia Andujar was born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland in 1931 and currently lives and works in São Paolo. She grew up in Transylvania, which at the time had recently been incorporated to Romania after years of Hungarian domination. During WWII, Claudia’s father, a Hungarian Jew, was deported to Dachau where he was killed along with most of her paternal relatives. Claudia Andujar fled with her mother to Switzlerand, immigrated first to the United States in 1946, then to Brazil in 1955 where she began a career as a photojournalist. Claudia Andujar first met the Yanomami in 1971 while working on an article about the Amazon for Realidade magazine. Fascinated by the culture of this isolated community, she decided to embark on an in-depth photographic essay on their daily life after receiving a Guggenheim fellowship to support the project. The photographs she made during this period show how she experimented with a variety of photographic techniques in an attempt to visually translate the shamanic culture of the Yanomami.