Photo: © TASCHEN Sebastião Salgado (Collector's Edition)
'In GENESIS, my camera allowed nature to speak to me. And it was my privilege to listen.' —Sebastião Salgado
In 1970, at the age of 26, Sebastião Salgado held a camera for the first time. Looking through the viewfinder was a revelation: suddenly, life made sense. Although it took years before he could earn a living from photography, from that moment on the camera became his instrument for engaging with the world. Salgado immediately developed a preference for black-and-white photography. He took very few color photographs early in his career and eventually abandoned color altogether.
Until the age of 16, he lived on a large farm in Brazil amid a rainforest, where he developed a deep love and respect for nature. He was also acutely aware of how people are shaped by their often devastating socioeconomic circumstances.
Salgado’s extensive body of work can be divided into three long-term projects: Workers (1993), documenting the disappearing way of life of manual laborers around the world; Migrations (2000), a tribute to mass migration driven by hunger, natural disasters, environmental degradation, and demographic pressure; and finally, Genesis, the result of an eight-year expedition to mountains, deserts, and oceans, and to animals and people that have so far escaped the imprint of modern society—the land and life of a still-pristine planet.
“46% of the planet is still as it was in the time of Genesis,” Salgado reminds us. “We must preserve what remains.” Together with the Salgados’ Instituto Terra—a nature reserve in a small restored section of Brazil’s Atlantic Forest in the Rio Doce Valley—the Genesis project is dedicated to showing the beauty of our planet, reversing the damage that has been done, and preserving it for the future.
For the project, Salgado completed more than thirty journeys, traveling on foot, in light aircraft, aboard ships or canoes, and even in balloons, through regions of extreme heat and cold and sometimes dangerous conditions. He created a collection of images that presents nature, animals, and Indigenous peoples in breathtaking beauty. His outstanding command of black-and-white photography makes him a rival to Ansel Adams. The tonal variations in his work and the contrasts between light and dark recall old masters such as Rembrandt and Georges de La Tour.
Genesis presents a selection of photographs arranged geographically in five chapters: Planet South, Sanctuaries, Africa, Northern Spaces, Amazonia, and Pantanal. Salgado hopes to make a meaningful contribution to global awareness and to the realization that we must give something back if we are to continue living here. Genesis is therefore his ‘love letter to the planet.’
The limited Collector's Edition is designed as a large-format portfolio that circles the planet. According to the renowned photographer, it should be seen as a great tree, with enormous double-page spreads created so that viewers can spend an entire day looking at each photograph. This 59-kilogram edition (€ 3,000) is a milestone in both photography and publishing.
See also the book Africa and the film The Salt of the Earth by Sebastião Salgado on this website.
Translation: © Fotografie.nl
Genesis — Sebastião Salgado
Pages: 520
Price: € 54.99
Publisher: Taschen/Librero
ISBN: 9783836538725. Language: English. This article refers to the English-language edition.
