El Yunque

By Bruno Chalifour

El Yunque - Bruno Chalifour
  • Release Date: 2012-09-07
  • Genre: Photography

Description

A tropical rainforest is a phenomenal, rare, and rather humbling experience–a real space speaking of geography (and climate), autobiography, and metaphoric (to quote Robert Adams).<br>
A book of photographs also creates a very idiosyncratic world where juxtapositions and associations can generate esthetic, emotional, and, once again, metaphorical content.
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El Yunque is the second highest mountain in El Yunque National Forest, located North East of the island of Puerto Rico. It is 3,494-ft high. Given its 200 inches of annual rain, the massif is covered by a luxuriant tropical rainforest. Such a vegetation constitutes an amazing universe where one is reduced to the role of Gulliver lost among giant ferns in an ocean of green.
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These images where taken along the valley of the Cubuy river, a mountain creek that flows down El Yunque’s south-eastern side. The National Rainforest itself covers part of the Luquillo range, 30 miles south-east of San Juan, Puerto Rico’s capital. A road, Carretera 191, used to cross El Yunque following a North-South axis. Hurricanes and the landslides that followed them have become the agents of a reconquering nature. Carretera 191 sometimes completely disappears. Human attempts to control the rainforest have failed.