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Thierry Falise: The Jarawas

Photo ©Thierry Falise-All Rights Reserved.
The Belgian photojournalist Thierry Falise has photographed a number of various indigenous groups, including the Jarawas, one of the indigenous peoples of the Andaman Islands, in his gallery titled The Twilight of the Andaman Naked People.

The Jarawas are estimated at between 250-350, and have largely avoided interactions with outsiders. They are a hunting and gathering nomadic tribe, hunting wild pigs, monitor lizard with bows and arrows. It takes a while to accept that the Jarawas are not an African tribe, but rather aborigines from a group of archipelagic islands in the Bay of Bengal, south east of India.

Based in Bangkok, Thierry Falise has covered South-East Asia and beyond since the mid-eighties, as a correspondent for Gamma photo agency and currently for the Bangkok-based Onasia. In 2003, he and a colleague were arrested in Laos after completing a story on a Hmong minority, and were sentenced to 15 years of prison. They were released after five weeks due to an international solidarity campaign.