Ludovic Carème, Brésils

(Paris: EXB, 2019)

I copy-edited and proofread this pair of books published by Éditions Xavier Barral by the French photographer Ludovic Carème who has been living in Brazil for 10 years.

Publisher’s description:

French photographer Ludovic Carème has been living and photographing in Brasil for over ten years. Carème focuses his lens first on the the favela of Agua Branca in São Paulo where unstable workers live. Then, he decides to go backwards the long way taken by the favela inhabitants. He goes where it all begins, at the source of the exodus, in the luxuriant Amazonian forest. By tracing back flow and time, Ludovic Carème ends up in the state of Acre. At the Northwestern tip, this area is the last to integrate the country. This is where live the seringueiros, latex soldiers, and natives descendants recruited by the government during the Second World War to supply the US army with rubber. Exploited by the food-processing industry that pushed them to wipe out the primal forest and deny their natives’ origin, families live scattered in the forest. Carème testify of the deforestation and captures as well the domestic space. Further away in the forest, Carème documents the exploitation of rubber tree, latex bleeding, palm leaves reflected in the water, the invasive mangrove…

An immersion in the Amazonian forest, Carème’s photographs convey both the mystery, fascination, and acuity that surround these natives.

Ludovic Carème is publishing simultaneously a second publication dedicated to his work in Brasil, São Paulo, showing the violence and poverty in the Agua Branca favela as well as of the homeless living in between abandoned buildings in the city center.