© Cristina Mittermeier
Mittermeier's portrait of a gathering of Kayapo leaders, shot with a Nikon D2x and a 28-70mm f/2.8 zoom. Click photo for more images by Cristina Mittermeier and others.
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Trained as a marine biologist, Cristina Mittermeier was a conservationist long before she was a photographer. Early in her career she found herself writing for various scientific journals but she was frustrated by the impact her work was having. "You would produce a pamphlet, and no one would read it," she says. Then, while working on the text for a book of photography, she saw the possibilities of reaching a wider audience with pictures. She later enrolled in an adult education course on photography at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., and four years later emerged with a singular vision and mission.
"When I would travel with wildlife photographers to remote areas, I would find my greatest joy by staying behind in villages and photographing the people there," she says. "It seemed like there was something I could do there that other nature photographers weren't doing." For Mittermeier, photographing indigenous people became a new way to approach the idea of saving the land on which they lived. This approach of tying together people and their ecosystems has become one of the important themes of the modern conservation movement.
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"What I try to do is show the relationship between humans and nature," she says. "And as a photographer, I find that indigenous people have a unique story to tell." A case in point is the Kayapo tribe of the Amazon, which is a potentially important player in the bid to save the Amazon from development, since it controls an area of the Amazon the size of New York State. "Indigenous people have roughly one-third of the undeveloped land in the Amazon," says Mittermeier. "Ensuring their cultural survival will greatly help ensure the survival of that important environment." Mittermeier has used her images of the Kayapo, such as the one above, showing a meeting of tribal leaders, to raise thousands of dollars to support efforts to protect their territory.
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