In 2016, the Spanish photographer Arguiñe Escandón sent her Swiss friend and collaborator Yann Gross a postcard. The vintage recoloured print showed the 19th-century explorer Charles Kroehle in the Peruvian Amazon surrounded by Indigenous people with a huge “trophy” crocodile laid out in front of them. Kroehle was among the first western travellers to photograph Amazonian tribes, but his eventual fate is unknown. Some reports have it that he was killed by an arrow in the jungle, others say he walked off and never returned. On the back of her postcard Escandón wrote to Gross: “I hope you don’t end up like him”.
The postcard was the genesis of a three-year journey the two photographers took in the Peruvian Amazon rainforest and a book, Aya (ghost), which attempted to examine the spirit of Kroehle’s travels in light of postcolonial criticism of his kind of “exoticism”, and the real environmental challenges faced by the descendants of those Indigenous people. The book is full of images like this one, which both celebrates the visual strangeness of some of the rituals the photographers encountered, and grounds it in the communities they lived among. This photograph is included in the Arles festival exhibition, Grow Up, which is devoted to the interaction of humans and the natural world.
The book Aya opens with the postcard Escandón sent to Gross, and as well as photographs includes inserts of Kroehle’s letters, reports on jungle flora, photosensitive prints and other documents. The ambition was a kind of boundaryless immersion or initiation in the rainforest, as distinct from Kroehle’s assumption of a privileged frame of reference. “The idea wasn’t to romanticise the Amazon, or to present it in a dramatic way,” Gross said of their travels. The reality of simply looking was tragic and surprising enough to require no enhancement.
Grow Up is at Manuel Rivera-Ortiz Foundation as art of Arles photography festival, 3 July to 24 September. Aya is published by Editorial RM
