A chance encounter with an anthropologist in Caracas led Álvaro Laiz to Venezuela’s remote eastern edge, where an indigenous people known as the Warao have lived for millenniums.

Mr. Laiz was intrigued when he heard about transgender women the Warao called “tida wena,” or, twisted women, because he had been working on a global project about transgender identities in nomadic and indigenous populations.

“For me it’s about identity,” Mr. Laiz said. “The kind of things that make you the way you are.”

Like other women, the tida wena tended to the home, cooked and cared for children and elders. They also participated in the harvest of important crops, like the ocumo chino, a starchy tuber. Historically, tida wena were sometimes the second or third wives of polygamous men. They also occasionally performed the role of shaman — the Warao are deeply rooted in the shamanist tradition — and tida wena in particular are thought to possess two spirits, bringing them closer to the ancestor spirits that roam the jungle.

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This dual-spirit identity of transgender people is common in some indigenous communities — Will Roscoe, an anthropologist and activist, identified some 130 examples in American Indian tribes alone. Though traditionally integrated and respected within their communities, encroaching social norms from elsewhere in Venezuela and blame for the spread of diseases like H.I.V. have threatened the relative well-being that tida wena have enjoyed for centuries.

While Mr. Laiz is no stranger to working in remote and foreign environments, he found working among secluded villages buried deep in the mangroves challenging.

“It was quite complicated,” he said. “They are really isolated from the other parts of Venezuela. It was like going to outer space, because you cannot put your feet on solid ground.”

On his first trip to the region, he spent two weeks in the community, soaking up everything he could about their way of life. The more he learned about the people, the more he realized that the environment around them was just as important to understanding who they are, and the more he worked to effectively represent that landscape.

For the Warao, everyday life has played out for 8,500 years in the lush and sprawling wilds of the Orinoco Delta, where modernity now encroaches. Although the Warao were longtime trading partners with neighboring tribes and colonial interlopers like the Spanish and the Dutch, their geographic isolation largely protected them. That time has long since passed, and in recent years the Warao have seen their traditions disrupted by endemic poverty, a high prevalence of diseases like H.I.V. and tuberculosis and even the arrival of Roman Catholic missionaries beginning in the early 20th century.

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In the late 1990s, a discovery of vast oil reserves beneath the delta further threatened their livelihood, and the advance of transportation and communication led to routine visits from rich tourists. This posed a unique problem for Mr. Laiz, because the Warao had become used to being paid to pose for photographs.

“It was difficult to break this rotten relationship between them and me,” Mr. Laiz said. So he brought a printer and started giving away photographs to each of his subjects. “It was quite a success. Once one of them had a photograph, everyone wanted to be photographed by me.”

The next year, Mr. Laiz made a second, 10-week trip.

Once used to quick magazine assignments, Mr. Laiz said his projects on transgender communities and other sensitive groups had profoundly affected how and what he photographs.

“I understood I needed more time to understand the people I was photographing,” he said. “To try to not feel what they feel, because it’s not possible always, but at least to understand how they became the way they are. It is a process.”

For him, that process aims to nudge viewers to “change their minds” about how they feel about these groups.

“We are used to seeing these kind of minorities, transgender people and homosexuals,” he said. “They are not accepted in societies, but they are accepted in certain parts of society — night life, prostitution — because they are not allowed to be part of society or the normal style of life.”

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