Pure Amazonia

Guido Sterkendries is an explorer and eco-photographer. Armed with low light lenses he captures a vision of Amazonia in all its colours, shapes and sizes, leaving no stone unturned in his quest to record the region’s diversity. His remarkable expeditions have deservedly won him a reputation as one of the world’s most committed and indefatigable photographers of extreme nature.
Not content with producing outstanding natural images, Sterkendries focuses his critical lens on the ecological, economic and cultural problems that confront Amazonia today. Driven by a passion for the green lungs of our planet he sees it as his mission to challenge the myopic short-term responses of politicians around the world to a changing climate and rapidly shrinking biodiversity, in the belief that together we can make a change.


Sterkendries’s stunning pictures of Amazonia’s incomparable and fragile purity appear regularly in BBC Wildlife Magazine, Terre Sauvage, GEO and a host of other publications. It is in order to share that purity with us – and to remind us of the increasing danger to it – that Sterkendries goes to extreme lengths at no little risk to life and limb and often in the most unforgiving seasons to achieve his astonishing close-ups of what are not only very beautiful but sometimes also very dangerous creatures.
Sterkendries’s photos are unique. They are appreciated not least for the exacting and rigorous conditions in which they are taken and through which he develops his vision. His book is both an ode to ongoing evolution and a plea for the conservation of this precious, extraordinarily rich, but fearfully endangered ecosystem.


Pure Amazonia is a prelude of the two-volume Battle for Life, Sterkendries’s own profound and moving account of his work in some of the planet’s most ecologically vulnerable areas, extensively illustrated with photos culled from twenty years of fieldwork. (www.battle4life.eu)