Viggo Mortensen in known by his roles in movies such as “On the Road” and “Lord of the Rings”.
Edited by the actor Viggo Mortensen, the bilingual book Sons of the Forest / Hijos de la Selva outlines the story of German Ethnographer and explorer Max Schmidt (1874 – 1950), and includes many of the remarkable photographs that he made in the field while studying the cultures of the Mato Grosso region of Brazil and remote areas of Paraguay between 1900 and 1935.
From the “Sons of the Jungle”. Max Schmidt. Available at Perceval Press website.
With text provided by the Argentinean scholars Federico Bossert and Diego Villar, the book not only reproduces many of the photos Schmidt took in the jungle of Brazil and Paraguay, but also explains the ethnographer background and approach, which differed from the more Eurocentric approach taken by others working in his field at the time.
The book is divided into two parts; Bossert and Villar’s essay on Schmidt, his work and and academic background and a selection of digital reproductions of his original glass plate photographs taken of the peoples of the Brazilian and Paraguayan Amazon basin. Mortensen, Bossert and Villar, with help from people at the Museo Etnogafico Andres Barbero of Asuncion, Paraguay where Schmidt’s original photographs are archived, began work on this collection back in 2009.
The book is published by Perceval Press, owned by the actor Viggo Mortensen. Mortensen’s support for the project is related to his interest in the indigenous peoples of the Chaco, a result of the portion of his childhood spent in rural Argentina.
