Marcella Brandimarti, Utópica, São Paulo: In 1980, while working on a report in the north of Brazil, Juca Martins heard about an enormous open pit mine in the state of Pará. Still not sure of what was going on, he entered the region with an authorization to remain for only two days in the Serra Pelada. The first Brazilian reporter to document the multitude of raggedy men digging enormous holes on the earth in search of gold, Juca Martins lucid and conscientious report shocked the civilized world; his images were a precise record of the visual chaos that was inserted within a rigorous and ordered paramilitary action coordinated by the military regime. With one of the photographs from this article, he won his second Nikon Award, in 1981. The photographs shown here are the only remaining vintage prints from the two times Juca pictured Serra Pelada, 1980 and 1986. Juca Martins is an integral part of Brazil’s last few decades of photojournalism history and one of the exponents of this genre, which expresses the human experience so well. By the end of the Seventies, with a group of authors-photographers, he founded F4, conceived along the same lines as successful foreign agencies, particularly Magnum. Born in Barcelos, Portugal, in 1949, it was in Brazil that he made his intense and award-winning career, which gained him national and international recognition.
