PERU
Florence Goupil
Florence Goupil is a Peruvian documentary photographer based in Cusco, Peru. Her work is primarily focused on human rights, ethnobotany, the environment and the living memory of the indigenous people of the Amazon and the Andes in Peru and Latin America.
As an Explorer and contributor to National Geographic Magazine; her work has been exhibited at ICP, Photoville and the Bronx Documentary Center. She is a regular contributor to National Geographic Magazine, UNICEF, Liberation, Le Monde; and her work has been published in Polka Magazine, The British Journal of Photography, Fisheye, Atmos, among others. In 2020 she received a grant from the National Geographic Society and the Pulitzer Center Rainforest Journalism Fund Grant. That same year she was recognized by the Getty Images Reportage Grant and by the PhMuseum Women Photographer. In 2021, she received an honorable mention from POY Latam as Ibero-American Photographer of the Year and later the Nouvelles Écritures award from La Gacilly Festival in France.
In 2023, Florence was invited as a speaker at the National Geographic Summit in Washington DC, where she presented her project “Qutiy, Returning to the Land” on Native American corn. In July, her awarded documentary short film “Cumbia’s Day” was presented at the Manuel Rivera Ortiz Foundation during Les Rencontres pour l’image de Arles, in France.
This same year, she received two Pulitzer Center Dom Phillips Reporting grants to work on the Brazil-Peru border about the uncontacted peoples of the Amazon.
PROJECT
Dialogues with plants
Environmental defenders and indigenous healers in Peru courageously defend their profound spiritual connection to the medicinal Amazon plants, engaging in a timeless dialogue with nature.
“How do healers manage to find the exact properties, when there are 80 thousand species of higher plants in the forest? There is one chance in 6.4 billion to find the right recipe,” says anthropologist Jeremy Narby.
The Shipibo-Konibo, Awajun, Bora and Matsés healers maintain that their knowledge about the specific use of plants, alone or mixed, is the result of dialogues with the plants themselves—with the spirits of the plants.
Utilizing their traditional recipes, they harness the power of psychoactive substances to access altered states of consciousness. Across centuries, this practice has guide their survival amidst the expansive realm of the Amazon.
However, extractive activities are destroying their world. According to a study by RAISG (Amazon Network of Georeferenced Socio-Environmental Information), in a pessimistic scenario, the country could lose 857,000 hectares between 2021 and 2025. Narcotraffickers, illegal loggers, miners, and others have taken control of natural resources. Since 2020 alone, 22 leaders and defenders have been murdered. The indigenous peoples of the Peruvian Amazon are disappearing, and with them, invaluable knowledge about the use of the rarest plants is vanishing.
Once we become aware of the physical and spiritual connection indigenous peoples have with plants, we can all take part in their protection. I believe photography is a legitimate medium to represent their valuable cognitive and symbolic relationship with biodiversity and to highlight their worldview. To give them visibility and raise awareness among future generations.