Amazon Footprints

Amazon Footprints is a fundraising photographic exhibition by Merseyside photographer Colin McPherson, which was be staged at Elude in Liverpool in June 2007. It showed life on Brazil’s Highway 163, a 1000-mile long dusty strip of road next to the mighty river Tapajós, which has become the frontline in the battle to save the Amazon rainforest from exploitation and destruction by loggers, cattle ranchers, soy farmers and multinational companies. The photographs document the daily lives of people who live on or near the highway and whose way of life is changing as rapidly as the environment around them. Although some villages are offered protection from the destruction caused by deforestation in protected reserves, the seemingly irreversible process of transforming large areas of virgin forest into agricultural land for cattle and large-scale soy production means that everyone living in the forest can expect change and disruption. Each year thousands of acres of irreplaceable forest is lost forever and the impact on the local and international climate is incalculable. All the money raised from the show went directly to a project to help a community of ‘riberinhos’ (river dwellers) to maintain their sustainable way of life. The aim was to raise the funds necessary for the purchase of a small boat for the schoolchildren of Nova Sociedade, a typical small village, situated on the banks of the Arapiuns, a tributary of the Tapajós in the lower Amazon. The £1500.00 raised enabled a boat to be purchased and fitted out with an engine and enough fuel to run it for many months. The children and the community benefitted enormously from this. To raise the necessary money, signed prints from the exhibition were sold for special prices starting at £40.00 with prints also available for purchase online from www.colinmcpherson.co.uk.

Want to link to this gallery?
Flash Slideshow:

Keywords highway dust fire trees brazil amazon para logging religion church colin mcpherson shanty churches farinha work village flona people road soy agriculture soya environment cattle farming global_warming climate_change tapajos soil river fishing manaus fish children schools football water sustainability heat panorama santarem br163 aerial rainforest desertification rio_negro economics drought sky leaves places indigenous machete ferry land blairo_maggi cargill