Andres Cardona is a photographer, videographer and artist who was born in San Vicente del Caguan (Caqueta), and his work on the Amazon has been published in magazines such as Time and Vogue, and newspapers such as The Washington Post, El Pais and Al Jazeera.
He is dedicated to documenting the so-called lungs of the world and its diverse realities, such as wildlife guardians and the ancestral knowledge of Indigenous communities. But also, unfortunately, he has recorded with his camera aspects that are destroying the rainforest, such as the armed conflict and deforestation.
That is why there are those who say that what Cardona is doing is documenting the death of the rainforest. But he is doing it, fortunately, with an echo of worldwide dimension. His work has been exhibited at the Latin American Photo Festival of the BDC in New York, at the Center for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona, he won the POY Latam award for best long-term project in 2023, the Eugene Smith Grant in 2020, The Global COVID Project of the Magnum Foundation in 2021, and the Gabo Award for journalistic coverage in 2024 together with a team of journalists who developed the platform Amazon Underworld.
In addition, he has been an explorer for the prestigious National Geographic since 2022, which has driven his work on the Amazon to different corners and audiences around the planet. He is one of those privileged people who have navigated the Amazon River from Colombia to its mouth in the Atlantic.
He knows everything about it, and that is why he can identify a lamentable reality of his place of origin: “I come from a territory that is the focus of Colombian Amazon deforestation. There we call it the gateway to the Amazon, but it is also the gateway to deforestation,” he told El Colombiano.
And he summarized with great precision what is happening in that department: “Caqueta is an accumulation of many things: the armed conflict, because at one point it sheltered almost half of the FARC, but also the arrival of deforestation, extensive cattle ranching, and a succession of booms: rubber, timber, coca paste, animal skins. It is a region that has historically been plundered,” he added in the same outlet.
Multiple agents are deforesting the Amazon rainforest
But perhaps one of his most shocking and revealing statements to the Antioquia newspaper has to do with destructive deforestation. “I start looking at the maps of heat sources and the rainforest was on fire. I made the first trips to document what was happening and I encountered several things: deforested rainforest, people setting fires, cattle ranching, people living inside natural parks such as Tinigua, Picachos and Chiribiquete.”
Regarding that first recognition of the problem, Cardona presents the other side that is very rarely seen, meaning that he offers a double perspective. “Because one asks: who is deforesting? For the most part, on one hand, people with major economic interests in extensive cattle ranching. But on the other hand, thousands of peasants who fled the war, who have no land, whom this country’s poor land distribution pushed into the rainforest in search of a place to build a home, raise their children and have a life that is not possible for them in the city.”
“The rainforest is that possibility: opening trails, cutting down rainforest to have a few hectares of pasture or planting coca in order to literally send their children to school,” Cardona continues in the same outlet, painting the harsh reality of the rainforest he documents, the two sides of the same coin. “I arrived and found people with bad intentions, yes, but also people who have no other option.”
That is what the work he presented in the exhibition Voices of the Amazon, at the Virgilio Barco Library in Bogota, within the framework of FILBo 2026, is about. A project that refers to Amazon deforestation, as Cardona warns, “without generating a moral judgment about who protects and who does not protect the rainforest.” But it is another wake-up call about the way the death of the rainforest advances, slowly but inexorably.