Salgado is one of the world’s best-known documentary photographers but a growing wave of Indigenous critics are angry about the exoticised way in which they believe non-native photographers portray their communities

Sebastião Salgado’s jaw-dropping images of the world’s largest rainforest are renowned for leaving viewers stunned. That’s largely been the case at the Brazilian photographer’s latest exhibition, Amazônia, which is showing at Barcelona’s royal dockyard museum. The 200 large-print photographs – each luminously lit, as though by a shaft of light penetrating the forest gloom – range from soaring mountains and storm-laden skies (“flying rivers”) through to spear-carrying native peoples mid-hunt.

But they haven’t pleased everyone. Refusing the curator’s invitation to “feel enveloped by the forest”, João Paulo Barreto, an anthropologist from Brazil’s Yé’pá Mahsã (or Tukano) ethnic group, walked out after just 15 minutes, visibly distressed after visiting the exhibition shortly after its opening last month.