Published by 5 Continents Editions in 2006, Xikrin presents the Kayapo people of Brazil’s Rio Catete, a Xikrin group whose encounter with the industrialized outside world placed an entire way of life under severe pressure. René Fuerst approaches this history as both photographer and ethnologist: his photographs are accompanied by descriptions and commentary on Xikrin culture, tracing a society materially economical yet marked by considerable imaginative resilience and adaptability.
The book’s central force lies in the relation between testimony and visual record. Fuerst’s images are complemented by gouache works devoted to two especially expressive dimensions of Xikrin culture—body painting and feather art. Twenty-four colour plates and seventy-two duotone illustrations give these forms sustained attention, with a precision that allows the painted body and crafted adornment to be read not merely as ethnographic motifs but as subjects of visual and art-historical significance.
That emphasis is inseparable from the circumstances of the work. The publisher describes fewer than one hundred Xikrin remaining in 1967, and reports a later recovery to 750 by the period described in the 2006 publication, with assistance from people including Fuerst. The book therefore carries the weight of a record made at a historical threshold: Fuerst understood himself as a witness to a culture and mode of life undergoing profound change, while his long defence of Amazonian Indigenous peoples gives the project a clear ethical and political context.
For collectors, Xikrin deserves attention as a substantial French-language photobook in which photography, written observation, and painted imagery operate together rather than as separate supplements. Its 228 pages and 24 × 30 cm hardcover format provide room for close looking, while the combination of documentary photography and detailed gouache plates makes the volume relevant to collections concerned with Indigenous representation, photographic history, and the visual study of body adornment and material culture.
