The way of the waterfalls.

• Author: Enyeart, James
• Position: Valdir Cruz, photography

More than two decades ago, Valdir Cruz began a photographic journey devoted to the preservation of the landscape and people of his native Brazil. For him nature and humanity are one, rooted in a symbiotic relationship that reveals the health of the planet. Two of his most recent books concentrate on the diversity of the Brazilian population. The first, Faces of the Rainforest: The Yanomami, is an extended portrait of an indigenous tribe that is fighting for its very existence in the face of modern industrial and commercial pressures. The second, Carnival of Salvador, Bahia, documents an annual celebration of the most concentrated population of African-descent residents in the oldest port city. Both multi-year projects point to the great diversity inherent in Brazil's human texture, people of varying mixtures of Portuguese, Spanish, German, Japanese, Polish, and Indian descent.

Inherent to Cruz's photographs of his fellow countrymen is an artist's desire to portray the richness of their cultural differences. At the same time his work points metaphorically to the inarguable need to preserve the equality of the individual in the whole. He does not see his artist's role as one of propaganda, however, but rather as one of preservation through a very personal interpretive lens.

Cruz's photographs are always about using the camera's inherent ability to capture motion, time, and selective emphasis as a fundamental part of his vision of constructing images that we could not otherwise see or imagine. It is his way of getting to the spiritual center of a subject and invoking an appreciation, an understanding of why it is worthy of preservation.

Ansel Adams often proclaimed that he was not a conservationist, but a preservationist. He believed that his landscapes were eloquent abstractions of nature. He hoped that they would speak directly to a sense of aesthetic appreciation in everyone and that such awareness would lead to the preservation of beauty for its own sake.

Valdir Cruz is working in the same vineyard, but his is a more varied task. In addition to his studies of people, he has also specialized in photographing waterfalls--a natural extension of what his insights into humanity have revealed in previous years about the oneness of nature. Cruz realized that waterfalls, as aesthetic subjects, had become all too commonplace from centuries of being represented in paintings and photographs. In that familiarity, he felt, was a danger of losing sight...