March 20, 2023

11:03

Ívina Garcia – From Amazon Agency

MANAUS – “I wanted the Amazon in me”; this is what the designer Livia Hadassa says, who tattooed the award winning image of the pirarucu, made by the photojournalist from CENARIUM MAGAZINE and AMAZON AGENCY, Ricardo Oliveira, on her skin. Besides her, Thiago Coelho Raposo also registered the photo that shows a fisherman carrying a pirarucu on his back. The fish is one of the largest fish in the Amazon basin, popularly known as the “Amazon cod” or “giant of the fresh waters”.

Captured in 2013, in the Mamirauá Sustainable Development Reserve, in Amazonas countryside, the photograph was awarded at the “Sebrae Journalism Award 2013”, with the title “Miracle of the Fishes”. The image was also used printed on book covers, artistic materials, and is now marked forever on Thiago and Lívia’s skin.

Designer Lívia Hadassa explains that she chose Ricardo’s photograph when she was looking for something that would represent her roots, but at the same time get away from the obvious: “I wanted something that had a degree of sentimentality to me, I am from Manaus and I wanted the Amazonas in me. I searched a lot on Pinterest [an image site], there were many domes of the Theater, but I wanted something else and soon Ricardo’s picture appeared,” she says.

Hadassa also says that the choice occurred because the image, for her, shows the strength of the riverside people. “The pirarucu is my favorite fish, it is very heavy, very big, and that image shows the muscles, and I like that Davi [the tattoo artist] was able to transfer that to the image. Of being able to show the strength of the Amazonian”, he explains.

Read more: Photojournalist from CENARIUM disputes national stage of Sebrae Journalism Award 2022

Technique

According to the designer tattoo artist Davi Rodrigues (image on the left), this was the first time he did something specifically regional. “It was the first time I did something very specific like this, but I’m very happy when my clients bring more regional ideas,” he says.

He also explains that the technique used is called minirrealism, which uses a finer needle and can reproduce almost any image in a smaller size, faithfully. “I spent a lot of time getting lost in the style that I wanted to carry forward, until I started to feel like getting to know it better, so I started to study more about and reproduce images like this, and now it has become my focus from now on, to learn more and tattoo better every day,” he says.

Inspiration

Ricardo Oliveira is from the Amazon, started his career in Rio de Janeiro, where he lived and studied at FotoRiografia. He was one of the winners of the “1st Amazonas State Government Journalism Award” and took part in the group exhibition “It’s Time for Brazil”, at the Louvre Museum, in Paris, during the 1998 Soccer World Cup.

“This image has been published several times, it’s been almost ten years since I captured it, and it’s still in evidence. People say it has become iconic with the depiction of the man-fish. I took it in a hard midday light and it highlighted the outline of the fish and the man being one being”, explains the photojournalist.

Read more: Piaçabeiros de Barcelos and the contemporary slave labor in the Amazon

He also tells that the inspiration to give the photograph its title came from a Milton Nascimento LP with the same name: “O Milagre dos Peixes” (The Miracle of the Fishes). According to the photographer, he sees the register on the skin as a sacred way to portray the Amazon.

“The pirarucu is the king of the rivers, I was just a channel for the image to reach them. I believe that the Amazon touches people, and it is very beautiful to see a record of it being eternalized,” he says.