We invite you to join us for Field Notes, a new video series featuring award-winning photojournalist and documentary photographer Orin Langelle, co-founder of Global Justice Ecology Project and author of Portraits of Struggle.
Join Orin as he shares the stories behind the captivating images that document interconnected global struggles for ecological, social, and economic justice across six continents and five decades.
In Paraguay’s Gran Chaco forest, one of the fastest-disappearing forests on Earth, the Ayoreo people—some still uncontacted—face existential threats from expanding cattle ranching, land grabs, road building, illegal logging, and human-set fires. Narrated by photojournalist Orin langelle.
Field Notes — Dispatches from the frontlines of land, justice, and resistance is a series of visual dispatches drawn from Langelle’s six decades documenting environmental justice movements, Indigenous land struggles, and social resistance around the world. Learn more about Orin Langelle’s work: https://langellephoto.org To sign on to in support of the Mapuche struggle, go to: https://globaljusticeecology.org/mapu…
In Paraguay’s Grand Chaco, the Indigenous Ayoreo people were hunted.
As white settlers expanded deeper into indigenous territory, this tower and others like it were used to shoot Ayoreo people as civilization came to the Chaco. The violence did not begin with bulldozers, but the bulldozers came.
I first visited and photographed the Ayoreo indigenous community of Camp Loro in early 2009. I traveled with Dr. Miguel Lovera and members of the initiativa Amatacodia, an Ayoreo support group defending the rights of uncontacted indigenous peoples still living in the Chaco forest. Campo Loro became one of the earliest Ayoreo settlements established near the Mennonite colonies expanding across Paraguay’s Chaco.
My photo documentation here was called Sharing the Eye. An elder leader of the community walked with me through their lands, village, homes, and workplaces, sharing his vision with me, which I recorded with my camera.
Campo Loro means parrot field. It’s a 10,000 hectare field that was given to the community in exchange For their nomadic realm of more than 10 million hectares. The Ayoreo were once the masters of the harsh northern Gran Chaco. They lived by hunting and gathering across an immense forest territory.
But ranchers, missionaries, roads, fences, and industrial expansion pushed deeper into the Chaco. The Ayoreo were forced into settlements. What had once been an immense nomadic realm became confinement. Yet life continues. Children grow up beneath an unforgiving sun. People work, repair, cook, laugh, watch, endure. There are still uncontacted Ayoreo living in the Gran Chaco.
They do not want contact with civilization. They wish to remain in their forest home. But today, Industrial cattle ranching continues consuming the forest of the Chaco. Every fence, every road, every clearing, every burnt section of forest, all connected. A freshly dug grave. Dr. Miguel Lovera once said, “Every single foot of land is in their crosshairs.” Last week [May 2026], Survival International warned that uncontacted Ayoreo communities remain under immediate threat as deforestation continues across the Chaco. These photos were made in 2009. They were later displayed in an exhibit in Camp Loro that same year. The images returned to the community where they were made. But the story is not over. The forests are still disappearing and the Ayoreo are still fighting for their survival.
Field Notes is an ongoing series documenting struggles from the front lines of resistance across five decades and six continents. I’m Orin Langelle.
This photo is one of a series of historical photographs contained in Portraits of Struggle, the latest photography book by Orin Langelle. Portraits Of Struggle highlights captivating images documenting interconnected global struggles for environmental, social, and economic justice across six continents and five decades.