GENESIS is Sebastião Salgado’s love letter to the planet. It is the result of an epic eight-year expedition to rediscover the mountains, deserts, and oceans, the animals and peoples that have so far escaped the imprint of modern society—the land and life of a still pristine planet. The GENESIS project, along with the Salgados’ Instituto Terra, is dedicated to showing the beauty of our planet, reversing the damage done to it, and preserving it for the future.
On over 30 trips—by foot, light aircraft, boats, canoes, and even balloons, through extreme temperatures and in sometimes dangerous conditions—Salgado has created a collection of images showing us nature, animals, and indigenous peoples in such intense beauty it takes our breath away. The reach is truly global. Through Salgado’s lens, one discovers the animal species and volcanoes of the Galápagos; the penguins, sea lions, cormorants, and whales of the South Atlantic; Brazilian alligators and jaguars; and African lions, leopards, and elephants. We travel over icebergs in the Antarctic, the volcanoes of Central Africa, the ravines of the Grand Canyon, and the glaciers of Alaska. We encounter the Stone Age Korowai people of West Papua, nomadic Dinka cattle farmers in Sudan, Nenets and their reindeer herds in the Arctic Circle, as well as the Mentawai jungle communities on islands west of Sumatra.
It has been almost a generation since Sebastião Salgado first published Exodus but the story it tells, of fraught human movement around the globe, has changed little in 16 years. The push and pull factors may shift, the nexus of conflict relocates from Rwanda to Syria, but the people who leave their homes tell the same tale: deprivation, hardship, and glimmers of hope, plotted along a journey of great psychological, as well as physical, toil.
Salgado spent six years with migrant peoples, visiting more than 35 countries to document displacement on the road, in camps, and in overcrowded city slums where new arrivals often end up. His project includes Latin Americans entering the United States, Jews leaving the former Soviet Union, Kosovars fleeing into Albania, the Hutu refugees of Rwanda, as well as the first “boat people” of Arabs and sub-Saharan Africans trying to reach Europe across the Mediterranean ea. His images feature those who know where they are going and those who are simply in flight, relieved to be alive and uninjured enough to run. The faces he meets present dignity and compassion in the most bitter of circumstances, but also the many ravaged marks of violence, hatred, and greed.
With his particular eye for detail and motion, Salgado captures the heart-stopping moments of migratory movement, as much as the mass flux. There are laden trucks, crowded boats, and camps stretched out to a clouded horizon, and then there is the small, bandaged leg; the fingerprint on a page; the interview with a border guard; the bundle and baby clutched to a mother’s breast. Insisting on the scale of the migrant phenomenon, Salgado also asserts, with characteristic humanism, the personal story within the overwhelming numbers. Against the indistinct faces of televised footage or the crowds caught beneath a newspaper headline, what we find here are portraits of individual identities, even in the abyss of a lost land, home, and, often, loved ones.
An inspirational account of the global initiative to eliminate the scourge of polio offers one hundred stunning duotone photographs that capture the campaign in five polio endemic nations--Democratic Republic of Congo, India, Pakistan, Somalia, and Sudan.
“What is it about a dull yellow metal that drives men to abandon their homes, sell their belongings and cross a continent in order to risk life, limbs and sanity for a dream?” – Sebastião Salgado
When Sebastião Salgado was finally authorized to visit Serra Pelada in September 1986, having been blocked for six years by Brazil’s military authorities, he was ill-prepared to take in the extraordinary spectacle that awaited him on this remote hilltop on the edge of the Amazon rainforest. Before him opened a vast hole, some 200 meters wide and deep, teeming with tens of thousands of barely-clothed men. Half of them carried sacks weighing up to 40 kilograms up wooden ladders, the others leaping down muddy slopes back into the cavernous maw. Their bodies and faces were the color of ochre, stained by the iron ore in the earth they had excavated.
After gold was discovered in one of its streams in 1979, Serra Pelada evoked the long-promised El Dorado as the world’s largest open-air gold mine, employing some 50,000 diggers in appalling conditions. Today, Brazil’s wildest gold rush is merely the stuff of legend, kept alive by a few happy memories, many pained regrets—and Sebastião Salgado’s photographs.
Color dominated the glossy pages of magazines when Salgado shot these images. Black and white was a risky path, but the Serra Pelada portfolio would mark a return to the grace of monochrome photography, following a tradition whose masters, from Edward Weston and Brassaï to Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson, had defined the early and mid-20th century. When Salgado’s images reached The New York Times Magazine, something extraordinary happened: there was complete silence. “In my entire career at The New York Times,” recalled photo editor Peter Howe, “I never saw editors react to any set of pictures as they did to Serra Pelada.”
Today, with photography absorbed by the art world and digital manipulation, Salgado’s portfolio holds a biblical quality and projects an immediacy that makes them vividly contemporary. The mine at Serra Pelada has been long closed, yet the intense drama of the gold rush leaps out of these images.
This book gathers Salgado’s complete Serra Pelada portfolio in museum-quality reproductions, accompanied by a foreword by the photographer and an essay by Alan Riding.
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