Photographer Lalo de Almeida, from Folha, wins the World Press Photo award

The photojournalist of sheet Lalo de Almeida, 52, was in an indigenous village near Altamira (PA) last month when he asked them to turn on a generator so that the internet signal worked. There he learned that he had won the long-term regional category of the World Press Photo, the most prestigious photojournalism award in the world, for his work in the Amazon.

That, in his view, was one of the main steps in his career. The next came this Thursday (7) with the announcement that he won the “Oscar” of photography. The Amazon Dystopia project, which documents the occupation of the Amazon and its impact on the forest and the region’s inhabitants, was the winner of the long-term category at the world stage.

Upon receiving the news by phone, this time in São Paulo, Lalo says he cried. “It’s an award that recognizes a very long period of work. It’s like recognizing your own career, which I’ve done for the last ten years.”

The work, started in 2012 and completed last year, consists of a sequence of 30 photographs. Twenty-five of them were made exclusively for the sheet and a good part of them was published in the series Amazônia sob Bolsonaro.

The series’ reports, which began to be published in 2020, tell the challenges to keep the forest standing, addressing topics such as deforestation, illegal mining and quilombola communities.

Most of the work was done in partnership with journalists Fabiano Maisonnave and Marcelo Leite and was funded by Rainforest Foundation Norway and Climate Home News.

In Lalo’s opinion, the award will help bring the problems of the Amazon to the attention of a global audience.

He considers that the Amazon is living, in the administration of Jair Bolsonaro (PL), the apex of its process of destruction. However, he says that it is not possible to blame the current government alone.

Lalo recalls that the project to build the Belo Monte plant, which gave rise to the award-winning work, was planned under the government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) and executed under his successor, Dilma Rousseff (PT). “The current government has stepped on the accelerator [da degradação].”

The professional says that the award-winning work shows that the Amazon suffers from a structural problem, the size of its dimensions — not just conjunctural. “The main function is to show the complexity of the Amazon situation. You can’t talk about the environmental issue without talking about the social one. The forest is not a green desert.”​

According to Lalo, the Amazon Dystopia project has no end date. “I will continue photographing the Amazon as long as I have energy.”

And, if he had to hunt for an internet signal to find out the result of the Word Press Photo regional award, this Thursday (7th) he will hope that one of his two daughters is communicable there in the Amazon.

Researcher at the Center for Sustainability Studies at FGV, Nina Almeida, 25, works on a project that assesses the impacts on the asphalting of BR 319, Manaus-Porto Velho highway. “She’s out there in the world, she gives me even agony.”

The World Press Photo awards ceremony is scheduled to take place from May 11 to 14 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Subsequently, the winning works in the four categories —long duration, large photo, story and open format— will be exhibited in several countries.

Lalo has collected awards. Last year, he won the World Press Photo environment category with a work on the Pantanal.

The series, which throughout 2020 portrayed the destruction caused by fire, was made in partnership with Maisonnave. In it, the portrait of a howler monkey kneeling and charred in the middle of a devastated forest stood out.

For the same work, he was recognized, in January of last year, as the Ibero-American photographer of the year by the Poy Latam (Pictures of the Year International) contest, one of the most important awards for documentary photography in Latin America.

Just last year, Lalo won the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Scholarship for his work in the Amazon. The honor and the amount of US$ 10 thousand (about R$ 47.2 thousand) are granted annually to professionals whose production follows the photojournalistic tradition of the American W. Eugene Smith (1918-1978) in his 45-year career.

He was the second Brazilian to receive the award. The first was Sebastião Salgado, in 1982.