The historical and difficult coexistence of man with the landscape: the desolate beauty of rural industrial landscapes.

As much as industrial development has brought improvements in Humanity’s standard of living worldwide, Man leaves his tracks in the immense and irreversible transformations and environmental damage inflicted on Nature, Urban and Rural Landscapes.

The portraits of these landscapes are authentic testimonies of the historical and difficult coexistence of man with the Earth. During my childhood and adolescence in a rural area of ​​southeastern Brazil, I lived and enjoyed many, if not all, pristine landscapes, and saw, over more than 70 years, the escalation of industrial development in the countryside, dominated by very extensive monocultures, before the coffee, then orange and, in more recent years, sugar cane.

I have a particular attraction and interest in photography for these rural industrial landscapes. As much as they invoke, perhaps, a feeling of destruction in most people, however much they witness human existence on the face of the Earth in a disturbing way, I photograph them because they cause me a feeling of timelessness, feelings of beauty desolate and mysterious, but at the same time, captivating however cruel this may seem.

These photographs, which reflect the current moment of constant transformation of the landscape by the industrialization process of the Brazilian countryside, provoke a confrontation, a conflict, a heavy discomfort in me when I compare them with those I knew in the past and that I have vividly in my memory . My great anxiety is expressed by asking me, without, however, having answers, how much longer will Nature have the strength to resist and how long it will take for these wounds to heal, if there will be time necessary before a total and irreversible collapse.