As the first book of the Bible, also this Genesis , etymologically the Greek word for “source”, is “the beginning of everything” in a world that has not changed in millennia. 250 images that make up the exhibition have been seen by over two million people since it opened in London two years ago, and arrive on Thursday the Portuguese public.
Genesis (Taschen) is the result of 32 travel-eight photos in extreme conditions. But before exposure, this work was book. We revisit the images that came to public in 2013 and which range from the deep Antarctic to the unknown peoples of Siberia and other shrines in the world, untouched by man.
Sick Soul
The long study on an isolated planet of civilization came from a sick man, wounded, deeply affected by war scenarios where he worked. When watching the film that also enters Thursday commercially, confirmed the force with which Sebastião Salgado was shocked – the war in Rwanda, the deep drought, famine in the Sahel, the destruction in Iraq, the disasters of Bosnia.
Peter A. Pina, Online RTP
“I had lost all faith in humanity,” he said Salgado on several occasions. After Workers – An Archaeology of the Industrial Age , completed in 1993 and Exodus (Editorial Path), 2000, two works, among others, high hardness, the photographer felt if ‘destroyed’.
For years, Salgado remained distant from the camera and wanted to return to the land of his birth. Was faced then with erosion and deforestation once a fertile forest, who fed and sustained the family during childhood.
“Earth Institute” founded in 1998, grew an almost two hectares ecosystem, with the planting of four million seeds.
Lelia, Salgado’s wife who always accompanied and supported the 71 year old photographer, had the idea to replant trees and bring life back to the family valley.
In Rio Doce district of Aimorés, in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, Salgado and his family fought the harmful effects of man on earth and began to cultivate more than 300 different species of trees. The implementation of this idea regenerated all the local ecosystem and brought back the Atlantic Forest then ruined.
Tribute to the planet
Awe, both with the possibility of Nature is getting re-establish in a short time and with relative ease, grew the desire to do something for the earth’s natural resources under threat.
In addition to the four million seeds planted in Rio Doce, Genesis was also a born seed of this initiative: “Nature and Humanity can not be separated. (…) The break with the links we have with nature is a threat, “can be read in the book’s preface. “About 46 percent of the Earth remains as it was in the time of
Genesis “. This was the new premise that Salgado went into a
eight-year adventure, an epic of the obscure life of the planet.
The first approach designed for a new photographic project was the most common: show and denounce the evils that urbanization and human activities leave on planet Earth. But at the doorstep was proof that Nature has the ability to come back to life and to restore fully.
Genesis is “a love letter to Earth” is the tribute Salgado the beauty of nature, but also proof of its great weakness.
Sebastião Salgado / Amazonas Images
Nature, animals and people
In Genesis, Salgado debuted in landscape photography and nature after having devoted decades to record human suffering. A visual ode to the magnificence and fragility keeps the Earth so characteristic black and white of his work, where the texture of each image tells the story and the depth of the moments of a sacred and timeless world where plunged into.
There were the obvious biblical connection that comes from the name of the work, Genesis is proposed to an almost divine character. Latent iconography in the images is accentuated by the strength of contrasts and emotions.
As the exhibition, also the book was divided into five different thematic and geographical areas: “South of the Planet”, where we see the penguins and characteristic species of Antarctica and the southern tip of Argentina and Chile; “Sanctuaries”, with special focus on the Galapagos Islands, with pictures of the tribes of Sumatra and New Guinea; “Africa”, a place that fascinated the photographer from the first trip, a “happy” return to accompany the beginning of mankind, focusing on Ethiopia, Uganda and the entire Sahara region; “Spaces North”, Siberia ends, unknown regions of Russia, natural parks of Alaska and on the United States; and finally, one last chapter is devoted to “Amazon and Pantanal,” the peoples and cultures of South America, the wealth of fauna, flora and ethnicities that the region contains.
exotic setting among the Korowai and Yali tribes, with cannibalism habits and houses located six to 25 feet off the ground, and the endemic species of the Galapagos and Madagascar, Salgado builds admiration the giant tortoise, which can live up to 150 years. “Maybe this same turtle had not crossed with Darwin himself,” imagine the photographer in Wim Wenders film launched today.
The dignity which gives the elements of nature that finds and photographs, is in fact, a brand of the work was to develop in the years before animals, given the still life. In palpable texture of the sea, in the pictures of moments of intimate confrontation between elephant seals, the ancient stories of the mountains and valleys of the Alaska Natural Park, in the surrealist outlined the rocks of the Grand Canyon, in Singsing ceremonies and rites of Yenchen and Kanganaman tribe, in the pose of elephant seals from Antarctica that, through mediation, they let them feel the thickness of the skin.
Sebastião Salgado / Amazonas Images
We humans
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Species, unique locations and reflected from a planet where hardly comes under the most extreme conditions. When we know Genesis also explore our own world and we are led to know the locals, mountain ranges, seas, islands and little-known quirks and a common mortal rarely has the opportunity to witness.
Look at the photos in the desert dunes of Zambia takes us to a new space-time dimension, and understand the culture, myths and traditions of separate Botswana people, or realize the notions of life of the tribes South Sudan, fully offset of Western customs, people like the Nenets, in the Kamchatka Peninsula, mirroring the face toughness and hardness of a nomadic community that chooses to live in constant freezing temperatures, lead us to a completely plane parallel to History without political boundaries and the westernized speech.
Sebastião Salgado / Amazonas Images
If in Salgado’s approach to photography is the art of patience, the approach to the photographed object is also the art of respect to the same. Otherwise it would not be possible to capture the movement of a monstrous whale-franca-austral, avoiding any sudden movement and even let it touch for a small next crew. Otherwise would not be possible the aesthetic beauty of the pictures of zebras, lions, elephants and leopards in a face-to-face meeting with the African Savannah.
Salgado could not fail to also honor the Amazon, the lungs of the Earth, such as Brazil and fauna rich, flora, animals and indigenous species. Inside South America found the Pantanal, the mysterious Zo’é a Xingu Indigenous Park in Matogrosso, “the size of Belgium” and once again we see Adam and Eve, in the simplicity and nakedness, but the affinities and links family, and the traces of youth and age, we see, in short, the cradle of mankind.
At the core of Genesis is one bit optimistic design for humans. The man in nature is insignificant and small to Earth. For more than destroy, their relevance is transient and does not exceed that of any other species.
But what is ephemeral is immortalized here in black and white, filled in neutral tones and dense, almost tangible.
Without any scientific, anthropological or documentary aspirations, the photographer brings together a valuable collection and can be included in the various fields of study. For immortalize an important heritage where the virgin and inviolate land is documented, it makes sense to return and study your work over the coming decades. Hans-Michael Koetzle, German photographer, great connoisseur of the history of photography, Sebastião Salgado considers “a kind of Henri Cartier Bresson of the late twentieth century. Salgado is a specialist in icons. The photographing becomes in formula to the destination. ”
tags: Exhibition, Photography, Genesis, Book, Sebastião Salgado,
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