Born 1931, is a Swiss-born Brazilian photographer and human rights activist. She is internationally recognized for her long-term engagement with Indigenous communities in Brazil, particularly the Yanomami people, and for combining documentary photography with political and humanitarian activism.

Early Life and Education

Claudia Andujar was born Claudine Haas in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, to a Hungarian Jewish father, Siegfried Haas, and a Swiss mother, Germaine Guye Haas. She grew up in the city of Oradea, a region that shifted between Hungarian and Romanian control. Toward the end of the Second World War, she and her mother sought refuge in Switzerland. Her father was murdered in the Dachau concentration camp, and many members of his family died in Dachau or Auschwitz.

Andujar later studied humanities at Hunter College in New York City. There she met the Spanish refugee Julio Andujar, whom she married in 1949. She retained his surname as a way of distancing herself from her traumatic past and beginning anew. In 1956, she moved to Brazil to live with her mother, and in 1976 she became a naturalized Brazilian citizen.

Career and Activism

Andujar’s photographic career began after a project documenting the Karajá people in central Brazil, which led her into photojournalism. Her work has been published in major international magazines, including Life, Look, Fortune, Aperture, Realidade, and Claudia.

She is best known for her decades-long documentation of the Yanomami people of the Amazon rainforest. Her work resulted in the book Yanomami: The House, The Forest, The Invisible (1998), among other projects. At the time she began photographing them, the Yanomami had minimal contact with the outside world. When a highway construction project through their territory triggered a devastating measles epidemic, Andujar suspended her photographic practice to focus on securing medical aid.

In 1977, Brazil’s military regime expelled her from the region after she publicly denounced the appropriation of Indigenous land by settlers. During the 1980s, the arrival of illegal gold miners caused further devastation, including outbreaks of malaria and mercury poisoning, resulting in the deaths of approximately twenty percent of the Yanomami population. Andujar played a key role in founding the Comissão Pró-Yanomami (CCPY) and in advocating for the creation of the Yanomami Indigenous Territory, which was officially established by the Brazilian government as a protected area of approximately 96,000 square kilometers.

Her work is held in major museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Tate in the United Kingdom. A permanent gallery at the Inhotim Museum in Brumadinho, Brazil, was built specifically to present her work.

Reference

Biography text from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA), English edition.
Retrieved January 19, 2026.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claudia_Andujar