Interviewed by Trip Avis

Photographer Sarah Fretwell’s project, The Amazon In Us, is a meditative reflection on the seamless relationship between the indigenous people of Peru and the land they call home. It is also a moving call to arms for the rest of the planet. Many people in more developed areas are numb to the growing divide between humankind and our ancestral roots in the natural world. This divide has alarming consequences. In places where their gift to posterity is the land that has raised and sustained you, blatant disregard of native rights is detrimental to their continued way of life and conservation efforts as a whole. The Amazon In Us seeks to pull the wool from our collective eyes: it is a rallying cry to remind us that if this impacts indigenous people, it affects us all as a global community. No matter how far we stray from the natural world, it is still profoundly enmeshed with our humanity, and it is our responsibility to protect each other and the planet we call home.

What drew you to this pressing issue, and when did you decide to pursue the project?

I attended a dinner party in Santa Barbara, CA, and met a mutual friend who had just returned from a forestry conference in Peru. I asked her about the state of the Amazon. She told me she was worried that she had heard people talking about “piritas del carbono” (carbon pirates) who were coming into communities trying to get people to sign over their titles to participate in carbon development projects - to be sold as carbon offsets. I think the idea dawned on both of us at the same time. We looked at each other across the table and said, “That sounds like a great story!”

I have personally been excited and curious about carbon credits. Whether they really work, whether the system of carbon offsets is regulated enough to help us legitimately address the climate crisis, or if we are “offsetting” our climate guilt and not really making a difference. Having worked in the forests of the Democratic Republic of Congo and West Papua/Papua New Guinea, I have watched as these areas are developed legally and illegally, always at the expense of the families who are native to the land. In these areas, you do not inherit money; your wealth is your land. If you lose your land, there is nothing to pass on to future generations. Land titling (and the inability to secure titles) is a recurring theme for many native communities in resource-rich areas of the world.

I knew if this was happening in Peru with legitimate and illegitimate carbon projects, it would be a huge issue for native rights, sustainable conservation, and the world's ability to mitigate climate change. What I discovered was much larger than I could have imagined. Peru involves a massive land grab in the name of conservation, a multi-million dollar deal that only benefited the Peruvian government and carbon developers, and legislation that turned natives into trespassers on their ancestral land.

When I returned from Peru, I showed this work to some mentors at VII, and they said, “Great work, but how can this be more poetic?” In retrospect, I think they meant I should go back and photograph more, but I intuitively knew I had just gotten out of a mafia-controlled area, rampant with government corruption, illicit logging and land deals, and cartel activity - it wasn’t a good time to go back.

I asked myself, “How can I use the material I have to tell this age-old story in a new way?” I remembered a comment Marisol Garcia, a native activist who is outspoken on carbon, had made to me during an interview. She told me that the core conflict is that native communities see themselves as a part of the forest, and Western conservation models do not. She told me, “The waters of our territory are the blood that flows in our bodies. The air purified by our trees is our breath of life.”

I thought the symbolism was so beautiful I asked her to repeat it a few times. The natives in the Amazon who live so closely with nature understand that those of us removed from nature are missing the point. The forest doesn’t need us; we need it - intact and thriving - in order to survive. Without the forest's biodiversity and ecosystems, the economy will not matter because humans will not be able to survive.

You write that “in reality, natives are fighting for the survival of human life on the planet by protecting the rights of nature.” The message behind the project is universal. In what ways do you feel that the photographs in The Amazon In Us can galvanize the world as a whole?

When I say, “in reality, natives are fighting for the survival of human life on the planet by protecting the rights of nature,” I mean the activists I worked with in Peru are not just focused on their family and territorial rights. They are truly concerned with mitigating climate change and with humanity's ability to survive. When they are protecting trees from being cut down, they believe they are protecting the future of human life on the planet. They are the first and last line of defense against the total devastation of the Amazon and understand this on a profound level that is missed by many of us who are living removed from nature.

As storytellers, we have to find new ways to engage with the audience on a heart level. I believe one method is presenting the material in a new way that stops them and causes them to just feel.

Neuroscientists have scanned the brains of people looking at paintings and discovered that just viewing art triggers a visual understanding, emotions, inner thoughts, and learning.

Art can also change the way we see the world and understand our connection to it. Viewers can love it, they can hate it, but at least it triggers a memory in their body about a place, an ecosystem, and a people.

I used a combination of documentary and landscape images, colonial maps, government documents, and secret documents to create “environmental art.” These images are shown as double exposures. They offer insights to what is being lost, and the key players are the natives who have lived, cultivated, hunted, and worshiped for generations.

The Amazon is in them—it is in all of us. We all need this magnificent place to thrive. We are one and the same; there is no separation.

© Sarah Fretwell Swimming in the Forrest

You overlay imagery of the forests and natural world with those of the native inhabitants. The forest lingers like a ghost above official park papers in one image. What are you trying to convey with this compositional choice?

It is Marisol’s quote and explanation of this concept that inspired me to start creating the collages for “The Amazon In Us” hoping it can generate a new and wider conversation about the rights of nature.

I used portraits and landscapes I had taken and overlaid them with images of intact rainforest surrounding their villages and burned-out forests we found on patrol. The result is something ethereal and a bit dreamy, but with a gravity that makes you investigate further. Think of it as investigative journalism meets art—and people on both sides of these traditional fields definitely have strong opinions about the crossover.

What I want to convey with the technique is the things natives know innately that all of us living so removed from nature miss. Illustrating the deep wisdom that can only come from a day-to-day and spiritual connection to the land. From the native perspective, there is no separation between them and the forest they are a part of. Spiritually, the entities that make up the forest, the trees, animals, water, people, and all life are important. ALL of these beings are critical to the thriving ecosystem of the Amazon.

Specifically, in the image with the government documents overlaid with a burnt-out piece of jungle, I wanted to show the government's complicity in all of this using the law when it works in their favor and ignoring it when it does not. There is regulation in place to prevent this from taking place on native land in the national park buffer zone; the government is just not allocating the money they made from the carbon deal to manage it properly, and often, local government officials are a part of the mismanagement and corruption.

I figure you can love the collages or hate them, but at least they will make the viewer feel something, leaving an energetic imprint in their psyche and hopefully generate a conversation from the heart. I was most thrilled that environmental defenders I worked with liked the images and embraced them with surprise but enthusiasm, using them on their social media and non-profit projects. To me that was the most important win of all, that the people I worked with in Peru felt honored and excited about how their story is being shared.

How was your worldview impacted by doing this project? Did helming The Amazon In Us change or affect your photography experience?

This is a project that will impact the trajectory of my work and life, and impact me forever.

I could never have known that the native activists would so warmly welcome me into their communities and homes and become friends. I never expected that one of them - Apu Quinto Inuma - would be murdered for his work as an environmental defender a year after we met.

You hear stories of the Amazon, environmental defenders, and illicit actors, and then you experience that it is, at its core, a universal experience: people trying to survive and make a better life for their families—on all sides.

I really believe there is a way that people, the planet, and even reasonable profit can all thrive. But in the old paradigm, it is economy and development above all else. As consumers in a global economy, it's our responsibility to question our role in it. It’s not an inevitable situation that is happening removed from us. A lot of this issue is our rampant consumerism—how much and what we consume. For example, there is no instance in which palm oil is EVER sustainable, so just don’t buy products that use it. For me, the answer is to vote with my dollars, not purchase products that deforest the

Amazon, research everything I purchase, and divest from companies that do not use due diligence in their business practices. We can’t do it all, but we can help create the world we want with our day-to-day decisions.

This project reminds me to follow my intuition and stories I am curious about even when I don’t know where it will lead, to push myself to tell each story in a new way, and that working for a cause greater than us always leads to success.

Links:

Website - https://www.sarahfretwell.com/

IG - @sarahfretwellphotographsandmotion