Cristalândia

“I started going to Cristalândia 16 years ago because I had no reason to go,” says photographer Joe Reynolds. “I’m a Brazilian who has never lived in Brazil, neither a foreigner nor a native, and I needed to understand why I felt Brazilian in the U.S. but American in Brazil. I needed to know if I belonged there.”

During the past decade-and-a-half, Reynolds has continued work on a series of pictures that describe a crystal-mining town in Brazil called Cristalândia, in the inland State of Tocantins. He knew no one there, and no one knew him, and a process of observing, familiarizing, documenting, and revisiting began to take shape in a series of black-and-white photographs. Rather than recording the town’s features from a remove, as a tourist might, he considered what it means to really meet a place and its residents and capture “an accumulation of bonds with land and people.” He continues:

These pictures describe Cristalândia as a place built on local relationships–shared experiences that give social and symbolic meaning to our environment and root us into the spaces we inhabit. I use the slow, bulky view camera, which is inherently collaborative and requires me to make pictures with people not of them, building relationships in the process. Cristalândia is a mining town whose mining no longer sustains it. Shared human experience, not economic opportunity, holds the town together.

Reynolds is spurred to unveil the reasons and ways that we connect with one another as a matter of urgency, especially “if we are ever to see beyond demographics and into the human inside each of us,” he says. Photography provides a window through which to connect with others and share in the universal experience of being human in a globalized, quickly evolving world.

Reynold’s project, which was funded by two Fulbright grants in 2022 and 2023, and a selection of images will be on view in Review Santa Fe at CENTER this November. He is currently planning the next phase of this series, which explores rural life in Tennessee, where he lives, as a mirroring project that explores what it’s like to feel Brazilian in Tennessee. Find more on Reynolds’s website.

All images © Joe Reynolds