Débora Ling: The Free Childhood of the Kuikuro

How old are you? Where do you currently live and work?

I am 51 years old, I live and work in Curitiba, Paraná, but I photograph around the world.

Tell us about your journey in photography. When did you start photographing and why? What role does photography play in your life?

Photography entered my life from a very young age, because I have a mother who is a photographer and photography teacher. I learned a lot from her, she has incredible teaching skills. We are a family of passionate female and male photographers.
I am a lawyer, and I ended up setting aside my passion for photography, but only for a while. With the birth of my daughters and the first contacts with the digital world, I resumed studies, books, and courses.

I was always a dreamy child; books, movies, and even school projects made me fly to imaginary worlds, which freed me from all the excess responsibility I had been accumulating in life. It took me a while to gather the courage to actually fly, but once I started, there’s nothing that can make me stop, and photography became the translation of all the freedom I see, feel, and learn when I am traveling.

I am a traveling photographer, I travel in stories, in places, and in people. On my travels, I have found incredible people, cultures, diversity, life, and freedom. The differences that mark and the similarities that unite people around the Earth enchant me.

My motto is to show joy, lightness, simplicity, communion with nature, all with great dignity and respect for people, their homes, their work, their family, their truths. This can sometimes be difficult, considering the harshness of our days, the violence, poverty, and so many individual and collective problems that only grow.

Since 2016, I have been traveling the world, photographing lives. I have been to India, Nepal, Bhutan, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Ethiopia, various places in Europe, the USA, and mainly here in Brazil, where I want to focus my work in the coming years. And maybe in Africa, Asia… wherever life calls me.

Today I have a more precise awareness of consistent work in photography. Participation in study groups, courses, and immersive experiences has given me a clear response about the work I already have and what I still intend to develop.

For years I went out photographing aimlessly, fleeing from some painful personal stories, and the paths I traveled were always of touching beauty. Photography found me lost and revealed to me encounters of soul and light. Now I can get lost knowing what the path is.

Tell us about your finalist work for the FotoDoc Photo Contest 2025. When and where was it created? What is its concept? How does it fit into your photographic practice?

When I was a child, I think in the 5th or 6th grade, we presented a school project about the Amazon. Our project was spectacular and was awarded at the Municipal Science Fair, something super incredible at the time. My part was about indigenous peoples. So, full of curiosity, in the 1980s, I devoured all the Geográfica Universal magazines from my mother’s collection, books, and encyclopedias, interviewed a professor who had a doctorate in anthropology, learned everything about the Kuarup, and swore that one day I would go to the Xingu, move there, and write a book.

It took me almost 40 years, but I went! I started with the Lower Xingu, with the Xavante – another people that fascinated me, and only in 2024 did I conquer the lands explored by the Villas-Bôas Brothers. We were received by the Kuikuro, in the Ipatsé Kuikuro Village, people of the Upper Xingu. I watched part of the Kuarup and the entire Tawarawana ritual (Fish Festival). I stayed at the house of Chief Afukaka Kuikuro, portrayed in Sebastião Salgado’s “Genesis.”

There we were able to live together, hear stories and more stories, participate in rituals, eat a lot of fish and biju (cassava bread), and take many baths in the large lagoon that forms next to the village.

It is there that the children play, learn, live. They live free and full of energy and curiosity. This childhood, which smells of nostalgia for what I never lived, is what I want to portray. Touched by the words of Ailton Krenak in “Ancestral Future,” I saw those boys living freedom, intense, present, close to animals and nature, with all their challenges and discoveries, “in their homes, which is inside the rivers.”\

The photo chosen as a finalist is part of an essay I am carefully editing, but it translates the entire meaning of this work, a search for a free, present, and intense childhood.

The boy photographed is Atatüxu, son of Kamiha Iracema and Yamalui Narru, brother of Twona, grandson of Chief Afukaka and great-grandson of Narru Kuikuro, the first Indigenous person from the Upper Xingu to learn Portuguese and whose story was portrayed in the book written by his grandson, the anthropologist Yamalui.

On this day, we went to the lagoon, which is about 1 km from the village, along a road covered in forest. Our company was Atatüxu and another younger boy, whose name I couldn’t even understand. They walked along the path showing us plants, animals, footprints, running, jumping, telling things non-stop, but upon arriving at the lagoon, they amazed us with the potent energy of childhood and profound teachings about freedom.
Real people, who live differently, who want peace, health, and happiness, like all of us. Who don’t care about the anxiety of the hours, who live in the present.

What projects are you currently working on? What are your near-future plans for photographic production?

I have been working on a personal project, with the intention of turning it into an exhibition and a book, and even submitting it to grants. The work is exactly related to the FotoDoc finalist photograph, portraying original peoples, but in a less “caricatured” way, bringing more intimate scenes, mainly showing a dreamed childhood, free, close to nature, far from screens. Under the guidance of Alexandre Sequeira and Paulalyn Carvalho, in the course and discussion group “Professional Documentary Photography,” by Viva Rua.

In the same group, with guidance from Carmen Negrão and editing by PaulaLyn Carvalho, a collective book will be published, which will differently address the ancestral customs of the Tupi-Guarani people.

In another sphere, with guidance and a study group from Éder Chiodetto, I am debuting a more conceptual vision of my work, with elements of the Amazon, without necessarily including the human figure, but bringing what I can translate of magic, mystery, cycles. Something still embryonic, but which has been stirring my mind a lot.

I was invited to participate in BELA – the European and Latin American Biennial of Contemporary Art, with exhibitions starting on August 16th at Fábrica Bhering in Rio, and with exhibitions later this year in Osaka, Japan, and in Helsinki and Varkaus, Finland, with a work also from the Xingu and curated by Edson Cardoso.

In addition to all this, since the beginning of 2024, I have been revisiting many things I didn’t pursue, and I have a lot of material. I think it’s essential to review, reframe.

I still intend to finish the started projects, but my focus will be, in addition to indigenous peoples, the sertão (backlands), where I intend to return to finish a series that follows the paths of Euclides da Cunha, in the Canudos War, where he wrote “Os Sertões” (Rebellion in the Backlands).