Rafael Vilela’s ‘Forest Ruins’ receives top honors at Pictures of the Year Latin America

“Thank you so much! CatchLight played a fundamental role in this achievement! POY Latam is a beacon of some of the best photography and storytelling being produced in the world. Latin America is a powerhouse—the photography coming out of Latin America, especially from my colleagues of my own generation, is perhaps my biggest inspiration to keep doing what I do. Being recognized with 1st place in the Long-Term Projects category is a huge honor and a source of pride for me and the entire team that has worked on this project over the last five years—and here I’d like to name Richard Werá Mirim, a Guarani photographer and communicator who has always supported me, and Carol Lopes, an editor, colorist, and first-rate partner on Forest Ruins.

This recognition affirms that this story matters—that the existence of Indigenous peoples surrounded by megacities is a central narrative in the climate crisis, that there can be no solution without breaking away from the idea of an environment separated from human beings, without rethinking our way of life and consumption in major urban centers. Visibility is always a very important currency for Indigenous communities—it ensures respect, resources, and political sustainability for communities that are often completely drained by the daily struggle for survival, focused on how to make it to the end of the day, without much room to reflect on the end of the world.

As a photographer, I think this recognition also opens doors for completing the project, which still involves some research phases, a book, and exhibitions around the world. And it really encourages me to think about and start new projects that I’ve had in the drawer for some time.”

“I’ve always found the boundaries between information and art to be very intriguing. As someone who studied design, I’ve always been passionate about that frontier, which I first explored through infographics and later in documentary photography. It’s hard to draw a straight line, but methodologically, in the Forest Ruins project I spent at least three years working in a very journalistic, hard-edged dynamic of the traditional school. That led me to adopt an aesthetic of being an invisible, omnipresent, omniscient character—which was useful for what I had set out to do—but the project itself eventually pushed me to question that position.

After all that time documenting and trying, in some way, to explain how the Guarani community survived and triumphed through colonization—keeping their language and culture alive while surrounded by the megacity—I realized that strict documentation as I was doing it couldn’t fully tell the story. Because their strength didn’t lie in the material realm, but in the spiritual one. Colonization is a war that never ended, as the Indigenous thinker and philosopher Ailton Krenak says. In the Guarani case, I came to understand it as a spiritual war. And the cosmological element of the Guarani is smoke.

That realization led me to dive into research about this element and the Indigenous relationship with their traditional pipe, the petyngua, with the fire, with the fog—the meaning of each of these elements and their understanding of darkness, of shadows. This search gave birth to the portrait series Tataxina (Sacred Smoke), which today stands as a complementary, far more experimental layer to the first years of documentary work. It was a joint, collective construction with the Guarani—this time with their gaze facing the camera, empowered, authors of their own story. I was there as the photographer, and they as the builders of this imagery and cosmology that belongs to them and has carried them to this moment.”

“I think the greatest lesson I’ve had from all these years spent so closely with an Indigenous community was learning other ways of perceiving and interpreting time. Spending days, weeks, months in an Indigenous community makes you profoundly question certain Western values, and time is certainly the most defining one. I believe the first stage of the project speaks very much to the past, as it can still be seen in the present. For a long time, I thought I was documenting “the history” of the Guarani Mbya in São Paulo, until I finally understood that the real focus of my research was much more about white ignorance—my own ignorance—of someone who lived 30 years in a city without knowing its original inhabitants, without knowing the history of this territory before it became a city, without knowing the forest that once stood here.

The research forced me to look differently at the city where I grew up, to see the deep relationship the Guarani have with the land—even while being contemporaries and fellow inhabitants of a megacity like São Paulo, with its 21 million people. It pushed me to question the present by looking at the past. How did we get here? What territory was this when the Portuguese arrived? Who lived here? How many biomes existed in this place? How was enslaved Indigenous labor used to build the wealth of European metropolises and Brazilian elites? How Indigenous is the city of São Paulo?

In the latest phase, with the portraits, I think there’s an aesthetic search for transcendence—both my own as a photographer, trying to free myself from the values and methodologies of traditional documentary practice and from the digital dominance of photography, and a shared gaze with the Guarani toward their ancestral future. That magical capacity of smoke to be and not be, to be seen but not touched, to serve as a tool of reading and writing developed over millennia by the Guarani people. Photographing smoke was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, but the process was incredibly powerful and transformative. And the results only began to emerge once I accepted its impermanence, its fluidity, and its mystery.”

“I resisted the idea of a book for a long time. I’ve always felt there’s a certain hype around making books just for the sake of it—a kind of insular trend within the photography world, producing for itself rather than crossing boundaries or reaching other universes beyond our own circle. But after all these years of research, I feel the work has matured to the point where a publication makes sense, and with a very clear purpose: to preserve this memory and knowledge beyond social media, beyond the digital. I want it to be a tool of resistance and sustainability for Guarani villages—to preserve their memory and also generate resources.

In conversations with Chico Noelli, one of the foremost Guarani archaeologists in the world, he convinced me that what I’m doing is also a form of archaeology of the present—an attempt to register the way of life and culture of a people in a given context, with both documentary and philosophical foundations, which can be useful for the future and perhaps hold important keys to the past.

Beyond the traditional documentation and the study of smoke, I’m also working with my colleague researcher Karen Gronich on cataloging all the documents created by Europeans about the Guarani between the 16th and 19th centuries. These include accounts, drawings, and paintings that show the evolution of the colonial gaze on this people, on Indigenous peoples more broadly, and on the American territory itself. We’re cross-referencing this with my own archive and with the material of the Guarani who are part of the project. It’s a new layer that will be added to the existing ones.

As for exhibitions—this year we had Nhemboaty (“Meeting” in Guarani), a first pilot experience in London and inside Indigenous territory, supported by the British Council, and it was a huge discovery for me. I’ve always been someone who strongly believed in the press and its ability to massify debates and issues, which is why exhibitions were never really my focus. But I feel that, with the deepening editorial crisis, physical and in-person experiences have gained new strength. I’ve come to understand that exhibitions, when immersive and sensorial, can create incredible and profound connections, even if they reach fewer people—the impact can be exponential.

We are now planning a large exhibition for the Iberian Peninsula next year, which will consolidate a broader and more solid body of work to circulate in Europe and the Americas in the years ahead. I think it’s very important that this work, and Guarani reality itself, be shown and made visible in countries like Spain and Portugal—the very nations that invaded, killed, catechized, and enslaved the Guarani for centuries. These countries have a violent and deep history with these peoples, and to this day there has been no form of reparations. I want to spark this debate and touch that wound. In Brazil, we also want to expand the experience of bringing the work to more Guarani villages—and at the same time, bringing audiences from the cities into the villages, not just to see the work but, more importantly, to encounter Indigenous life that continues to exist and survive within the great urban centers.”

“I’m honestly quite tired of the current logic of funding for journalism. As storytellers, we’re forced to beg for resources from different organizations, apply for small grants, convince editors, convince publications. But we’re the ones on the ground, who actually know the stories, who understand their power and the impact they can have on both local and international audiences. The journalism crisis has turned the practice into a grueling exercise in entrepreneurship, when in fact it should be treated as a public utility.

That’s why I’ve been thinking a lot about how to establish a method to continue my work in research and documentation—right now very focused on the profound environmental and civilizational crisis we’re living through. I believe we need to build platforms and long-term sustainability, in interdependence with organizations, the press, and civil society movements such as the Indigenous movement.

The Nhemboaty experience was incredibly powerful and reminded me, in so many ways, of the reasons I began this journey and of the deeper meaning photography can hold: to break through bubbles and connect worlds, to generate encounters.

I’m now in the process of starting a micro-endowment, a pilot project to experiment with a new methodology for financing the kind of journalism I believe in and practice—along with so many partners and collaborators who work alongside me. It’s an initiative designed to fund 30 years of work, to push the boundaries of research and the exploration of realities that remain undocumented—something that, thankfully, artificial intelligence will never be able to do. I’m fortunate to count on CatchLight as an incredible partner helping me navigate and find this path in the years ahead.”

“As the Brazilian writer Rubem Alves once said, ‘Speech is only beautiful if it’s born from long and deep listening.’ To build any kind of project with communities—especially Indigenous communities—you need to dedicate most of your time to listening, learning, absorbing, before trying to say anything at all. 

Trust the process; the process is king. What we see too often are aesthetic products (photos, films, etc.) that are born out of toxic, extractive, colonizing, parachute processes—that take without giving anything back. We need to invert that logic: build strong relationships, genuine collaborations, partnerships, be present and available to the communities. That will invariably generate meaningful results. People are not easily fooled anymore—it’s obvious when a project lacks that involvement. It feels empty.

Long-term means long commitment, long persistence, long-term funding, long alliances, and that only lasts if, above all else, you have a long-standing passion for the subject and for the project itself. Let that guide you—not trends, not what people expect or want to hear or see. Believe in your intuition, follow what inspires you, and I’m sure it will work out.”