Indiens d’Amazonie 1955-1975 gathers René Fuerst’s black-and-white photographs from two decades of encounters with Indigenous communities in Brazil, particularly in Mato Grosso and the deeper Amazonian forest. Published by 5 Continents Editions in 2019, the 144-page French-language hardcover presents an extended record of observation shaped by Fuerst’s parallel work as an ethnologist. The book is concerned not with an abstract Amazonian spectacle, but with people encountered through research, travel, and sustained residence between 1955 and 1975.
Faces, bodies, ceremonies, and the rhythms of daily life form the book’s principal subjects. Some scenes are quiet and composed; others register dance and collective movement. Alongside them appear the objects Fuerst gathered for ethnographic collections, including those that enriched the Musée d’ethnographie in Geneva. This combination gives the photographs a double address: they are records of particular lives and situations, while also bearing the marks of a long-term intellectual and documentary practice.
The volume’s force lies in that sustained proximity. Fuerst’s images attend to dignity as it is expressed in gesture, adornment, ritual, work, and ordinary presence, while the historical frame remains unavoidable. His access to communities living in freedom, his participation in research projects, and his later criticism of Brazilian policy toward Indigenous populations place the photographs within a period of changing relations between Indigenous peoples, institutions, and the state. The book therefore invites reflection on both the intimacy and the limits of ethnographic looking, including the difficult questions associated with Lévi-Strauss’s notion of the “sad tropics.”
For collectors, this is a substantial photographic document whose value rests in the coherence of its subject, the duration of its making, and the meeting of visual testimony with ethnological inquiry. Its 72 duotone illustrations and generous 24 × 29.7 cm format allow the encounters to remain central, while the book’s French presentation preserves the context in which Fuerst’s observations were first articulated. It deserves attention as a concentrated account of Amazonian Indigenous life—and as a record of one researcher-photographer’s lifelong engagement with it.
