Vanishing Amazon

Mirella Ricciardi’s pioneering photography is more relevant today than when she took her groundbreaking images three decades ago, providing a remarkable lens through which to view the interconnectedness of the Amazon’s indigenous tribes, its ecosystem, home to around ten percent of species, and the future of the global climate system. 

© Mirella Ricciardi MR 2238

With Ricciardi’s blessing to reproduce her influential images, museum directors Julia Knights and Roger Highfield celebrate the work of the Kenyan-born photographer ahead of key United Nations meetings, each known as a Conference of Parties, notably COP16 on biodiversity in Colombia and COP30 on climate change in Belém, the gateway to the Amazon, which straddles nine countries in South America.

To complement the work of Ricciardi, who in 2025 marks 75 years as a photographer, we talk to Beto Marúbo, indigenous leader, while revealing the state of the Amazon rainforest using satellite images.

Mirella Ricciardi's groundbreaking 1990 photographs serve as a poignant testament to the plight of the Brazilian Amazon before and since the historic 1992 Rio Summit, which led to a demarcation of the Yanomami Tribe’s territory within the Amazon for the first time.

Having witnessed ‘miles and miles of smoke and fire’, as if on the edge of an apocalypse, she initially wanted to call her resulting book of photographs Beyond the Frontiers of Fire—listen to a clip of Ricciardi discussing this below, where she also mentions her love for the work of Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado who had dedicated his life to saving the Brazilian Amazon rainforest.

The year of 1990 was deeply significant for climate science too, marking the first assessment report on the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which paved the way for the first international climate meeting, known as the Conference of Parties or COP, in Germany in 1995.

When juxtaposed with contemporary images, Ricciardi’s Vanishing Amazon photographs are a call to arms to halt forest destruction, and a powerful narrative about how humans drive both ecological and climate change.

They reveal both hope and despair: the rainforest has declined to where some scientists fear it may pass or have already overstepped a tipping point, beyond which it will turn into savannah to send shockwaves across the global climate system; equally, recent discoveries are an eloquent testament to how indigenous people can teach us all to live in harmony with the forest.

Indigenous people connect the Amazonian forests with the fate of the rest of the planet: rainforests they live in harmony with are important net carbon sinks - they remove climate-heating carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Based on data gathered from 2001-2021, they collectively remove 340 million tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year, equivalent to the U.K.’s annual fossil fuel emissions. 

The decline of the rainforest could diminish the ‘flying rivers’ – air currents that carry water vapour thousands of kilometres across Amazonia, which falls as rain, enabling agricultural production across Brazil and other parts of South America. 

The fear is that, if the tipping point is passed, the forest could turn into a dry grassland or savannah and release more planet-heating carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to disrupt the global climate system. This, in turn, will impact livelihoods across the globe. What happens to the Amazon impacts us all.

© Mirella Ricciardi MR860

“Threats to the rainforest and Indigenous communities jeopardize both the immense body of knowledge these people hold and the environmental balance of the planet,” commented Mirella Ricciardi. “The camera is my best form of protest. There is not much more I can do or know how to stop the inhumane and dangerous interference that alters the delicate climate equation.”

Complementing studies at ground level, scientists have used satellites to study the Amazon from space over many decades. 

During the 1990s and 2000s, the Brazilian Amazon rainforest sometimes declined by more than 20,000 square kilometres (8,000 square miles) within a single year. In 2004, the Brazilian government adopted an action plan, creating a network of national and state parks, establishing protected territories for indigenous people, augmenting environmental agencies, and strengthening satellite monitoring.

Starting with data collected by NASA’s Landsat 5 and 7 satellites, satellite coverage extended to daily observations of deforestation, fire, and vegetation health from lower-resolution sensors (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites, then using ResourceSat-2 and the China-Brazil Earth Resources Satellites (CBERS), and soon NISAR (NASA ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) satellite – a joint NASA-Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) mission, the first able to measure changes on the surface down to a centimetre.

© Mirella Ricciardi MR2869

As they play and observe their elders, indigenous children gradually become familiar with the forest’s astonishing variety of plants, mammals and invertebrates. Over time, they develop into skilled hunters able to recognise hundreds of individual species invaluable for hunting, medicinal, clothing and construction. 

To the naked eye, much vegetation from the Amazon rainforest might look healthy. But with the use of satellites, scientists can detect stressed plants and trees before they show visible signs of dying.

One orbiting tool, called ECOsystem Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer Experiment on Space Station, or ECOSTRESS, is mounted on the International Space Station (ISS) which monitors evapotranspiration – the combined loss of water through tiny pores in leaves (known as the transpiration) and the loss of water from soil (evaporation) – with a key aim to study how the forest responds to changes in water availability. 

These data may one day help scientists predict areas of forest that could be susceptible to fires. Here, fire symbols note places in the western Amazon rainforest where heat was detected by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite in August 2019.  

© Mirella Ricciardi MR1188

Benki Piyãko was sixteen when he and his brother Francisco guided Mirella Ricciardi on the visit to the Asháninka, in the state of Acre in Brazil (who also live in the Peruvian Amazon). “He wore his long necklaces made of dried tree fruits over his shoulder when I photographed him standing in front of the field that looked like a green carpet.” 

Having witnessed the devastation first hand, today Benki is one of the spiritual leaders of his people, leading projects to oppose deforestation and defend Asháninka rights and culture in the indigenous territory of Terra Kampa do Rio Amônia.  

The Amazon is changing, and in many ways shown here: A) Shifts in the dry season (July–October) mean temperature reveal widespread warming. B) Spread of savannah. C) Repeated extreme drought events between 2001–2018. D) Road networks seed illegal deforestation and degradation. E)  Protected areas and indigenous territories reduce deforestation and fire disturbances. F) Ecosystem transition potential (the possibility of forest shifting into an alternative state) across the Amazon by year 2050 inferred from compounding A-E.

Space–time deforestation trends within the Indigenous Territories of the Brazilian Amazon biome, or ecosystem, between 2013 and 2021: the territories facing increasing deforestation are shades of red, while those with a decreasing trend are blue. Indigenous territories, grey, show no trend, revealing how the local people are protecting the forest.

© Mirella Ricciardi MR2885

A welcome party in the Watoriki maloca, an ancestral long house, as observed by Mirella Ricciardi. She remarked: “The astonishing sight of that vast amphitheatre made the same impression on me as St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome….the collective house is the centre of Yanomami life.”

In the 1990s, you could have been forgiven for thinking that the traditional way of life in the rainforest was doomed, due to modernisation and the threat from deforestation, mining and diseases imported by visitors. Today, it is clear we have much to learn from indigenous people, underlined by the discovery that large settlements once coexisted with the rainforest.

Using LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) laser scanning technology, researchers confirmed early in 2024 that they had found traces of 2,500-year-old cities, corroborating research by a French archaeologist, Stéphen Rostain, in the 1970s. The researchers found more than 6000 earthen platforms distributed in a geometric pattern connected by roads and intertwined with agricultural landscapes and river drainages in the Upano Valley in the Amazon in Ecuador.

The new finds, which have only been possible using satellites to study big areas, suggest that there are ways for cities to evolve in harmony with nature at a time when there is much discussion of the role of cities in curbing climate change.

© Mirella Ricciardi MR1267

This is Elisa Tsainama (Kena), a member of the Marúbo, all who remain of several groups, devastated by the exploitation of rubber tappers and loggers, but united by language (Pano) and the leadership of the shaman João Tuxaua. They live on the Curuçá and Ituí rivers in the Javari basin and there has been a long-standing ambition to protect their lands, as well as those of other tribes including the Mayá, Matís, Matsés, Korúbo, and some of the Kanamarí and the Kulína. Mirella Ricciardi and her family see her pioneering images as an enduring tribute to the resistance of the indigenous peoples and their cultures.

Leão Serva, a respected Brazilian journalist who liaises with indigenous groups, discussed the legacy of Mirella Ricciardi with Beto Marúbo, or Wino Këyashëni, who is the representative of the Union of Indigenous Peoples of the Javari Valley.

Ricciardi’s images are nostalgic, Marúbo said, “a real archive of our people,” notably the generation who succumbed to hepatitis in the 1990s until the mid-2000s. He described how ‘the old are our libraries’, and how some Marúbo culture and knowledge had been lost as a result.

Today, he said, Brazil is “going through one of the worst moments in decades” because of climate change. Low river levels are disrupting the transportation of essential goods, with communities struggling to access food and water, while there are worrying changes in the law that guarantee indigenous people land and an ‘arc of deforestation’ that stretches from the southern region of the Amazon to Acre in the north of Brazil.

As for the future, he feared the further impact of ‘predatory economic fronts’ and of the exodus of young people to the cities. 

© Leão Serva/Personal Archive

Serva photographed the moment he shared Mirella Ricciardi's images with the Asháninka, notably Dona Pity, in the black, patterned dress, who hosted Mirella during her visit. 

Among the many people that Ricciardi inspired was Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado. His exhibition, Amazônia, a breath-taking series of 200 iconic images celebrating seven peoples of the Brazilian Amazon, was held at the Science Museum, London, in 2021 and the Science and Industry Museum, Manchester, in 2022. Here, in March 2023, Salgado speaks about Ricciardi and the plight of the Amazon.

Raw footage of Sebastião Salgado, with Mirella Ricciardi in her London studio that month, this time discussing the Marúbo people:

© Mirella Ricciardi

Mirella Ricciardi was born on July 14, 1931, in Kenya, to an Italian father and a French mother, an artist who had studied sculpture under Auguste Rodin. She began working in the early 1950s in Paris as an intern for Harry Meerson, a photographer at Vogue magazine.

Ricciardi was briefly an actress but realized that her vocation lay behind the camera, initially taking photographs on set, from Gina Lollobrigida to Alain Delon. She then set off in search of images that told fascinating stories, starting with her native Africa, a project which paved the way for her  successful 1971 book, Vanishing Africa, in which she aimed "to photograph the tribal life and customs of the people of Africa before they changed forever". 

In 1990, she was commissioned by Orion publishers to produce a book about the indigenous people of the Amazon rainforest, which became Vanishing Amazon. Ricciardi’s work also built on the work of the Brazilian activist photographer Claudia Andujar in the 1970s, who campaigned tirelessly alongside the leader of the Yanomami, Davi Kopenawa and Survival International charity for the demarcation of the Yanomami tribe’s territory – a campaign they eventually won in 1992.

In all, Ricciardi’s adventures have culminated in the publications of several books; The Voyage of the Mir-el-Lah (1980), African Rainbow (1989), Vanishing Amazon (1991) along with African Saga and African Visions (2000).

More of Mirella’s images can be found at: https://www.mirellaricciardi.com 

© Mirella Ricciardi MR4350

In 2025, the UN COP30 will be held in Belém, adjacent to the Brazilian Amazon rainforest. Brazil and its ecosystems, including other endangered biomes such as the Atlantic rainforest, are home to over half of the world’ trees species along with the Cerrado, the world’s most species-rich savannah grassland.

The stakes at the conference could not be higher as the aim is for 180 countries to submit their revised Nationally Determined Contributions (the commitments that countries make to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions) to keep temperatures to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels, the aim of the Paris agreement drawn up at COP15 in 2015.

At the time of writing, around one fifth of the Amazon rainforest has already been lost due to legal and illegal logging, fires, gold mining, land clearance for agriculture as well as the creation of hydroelectric dams. Gold miners and others who commercially exploit the forest often import malaria and sexually transmitted diseases which can be fatal for the indigenous people. 

But there is hope. 

Data from Brazil’s National Space Agency, INPE, show that deforestation has fallen by 50% in 2023 compared to the previous year – part of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s pledge to stop deforestation by 2030 upon taking office last year. 

Mirella Ricciardi’s images are a poignant and timely reminder of the importance of what we all stand to lose if the culture, livelihoods and knowledge of over 1.7 million indigenous people of the Brazilian Amazon are depleted. Our lives and the global climate system depend on their survival.  

© Mirella Ricciardi MR2932

“This woman was going down to the river to bathe with her baby when the child turned to me with a beautiful gaze, as steady as it was curious.” Mirella Ricciardi