Before They Pass Away is a photography project by Jimmy Nelson; across a series of journeys he embedded himself with 31 indigenous tribes around the world and took their portraits. His technique gives the photos a painterly, vintage quality:
The site is well worth a visit, there must be hundreds of photos there: people, families, their homes, landscapes. Really beautiful stuff.
And yes that is a golden eagle, our Kazakh friend no doubt a fellow member of Eagle Club.
He’s an Indian, and Brazilian officials have concluded that he’s the last survivor of an uncontacted tribe. They first became aware of his existence nearly 15 years ago and for a decade launched numerous expeditions to track him, to ensure his safety, and to try to establish peaceful contact with him.
Peaceful contact proved elusive, but those encounters helped the agents stitch together a profile of a man with a calamitous past. In one jungle clearing they found the bulldozed ruins of several huts, each featuring the exact same kind of hole—14 in all—that the lone Indian customarily dug inside his dwellings. They concluded that it had been the site of his village, and that it had been destroyed by land-hungry settlers in early 1996.
The most isolated man on the planet, the last remaining member of his tribe, lives alone in a 31 square mile ‘reservation’ in Brazil and has done for the best part of a decade and a half.
(via Kottke)