Born in France in 1951, Leonide Principe is photographer, sailor and tree climber. He studied at the Faculty of Architecture in Florence, Italy. In 1981 he crossed the Atlantic on a sailboat, sailed the coasts of Latin America and the Caribbean, and in 1989 he went to the Amazon working for the photo agency Sipa press of Paris. He then decided to settle in the largest forest on the planet and build an image bank of the region, called PhotoAmazonica.
He published several books, postcards, sent photographs to the main national and international nature magazines such as Terra, Revista Geográfica, Das Tier, Natura Oggi, among others. Exhibitions were held at the Latin America Memorial in São Paulo, Government Palace of Amazonas and Cultural Center of the Peoples of the Amazon (CCPA).
The actual action remains in indexing the archive in English and Portuguese, with generous captions including personal stories and impressions, technical data and metadata. 5000 of the most significant photographs are being selected from an archive of +100,000 images, to be managed by the CCPA under the terms of Creative Commons, that is, for free use in favor of culture and education.
