The Jungle Book: Contemporary Stories of the Amazon and Its Fringe - Tapa dura

When the Spanish conquistador Francisco de Orellana set out on his search for cinnamon in 1541, he could not have anticipated that his travels would bring him to the bends of the world’s longest river: the Amazon. Long a witness to evangelization campaigns, infrastructure development, and natural resource extraction, the river continues to arouse greed, competition, and fascination in its visitors. Following in the footsteps of past expeditions, The Jungle Book is a visual travel diary comprising discreetly staged scenes that reveal the diverse worlds of contemporary Amazonia and its surrounding areas. Photographer Yann Gross worked with different local communities in order to explore their lives in a time of ecological disintegration. Once immersed in this world, the viewer soon forgets romantic clichés of forgotten lands and noble savages, and begins to question the guiding ideals of progress and development that inform escapist fantasies of the global south.

Yann Gross (born in Vevey, Switzerland, 1981) is a photographer, filmmaker, and designer who graduated from Ecole Cantonale d Art de Lausanne in 2007. Gross has received numerous awards for his work, including the PHotoEspana Discoveries Week Award (2008), Photography Award at the International Festival of Fashion and Photography, Hyeres, France (2010), and the LUMA Rencontres Dummy Book Award (2015). Gross is a member of the international artist collective Piece of Cake and the cofounder of Canal GuaTeKa, an internet channel created for indigenous youth living in Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil.