Sebastião Salgado calls his new collection of pictures Genesis. It has been published as a book (Taschen), and an exhibition of Genesis photographs is touring the world – it’s showing at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris until January 5. The German director Wim Wenders is making a documentary about the project titled Shade and Light. This “homage to our planet in its natural state” is entirely monochrome. Salgado insists that he doesn’t know how to photograph in color, which he says leaves nothing to the imagination. He prefers “the chiaroscuro palette of black-and-white images.” The 245 photos in the Paris exhibition are divided, like the book, into five sections: Planet South, Sanctuaries of Nature, Africa, the Great North, and Amazonia and Pantanàl. Each and every image reflects Salgado’s fascination with the natural world. “I didn’t take images as a photojournalist or zoologist. I did it for myself, to explore this planet with its minerals, vegetation and animal life. I came to the realization that we owe it immense respect.” Salgado’s inspiration is not Biblical. For him, Genesis, “the beginning of everything,” is a world untouched by industrialization. That is where he could photograph “the air, water
and fire that gave birth to life.” Places like the Galapagos Islands, the icy Kamchatka peninsula or the rolling sand dunes south of Djanet in Algeria. And the Antarctic. “The place,” said Salgado at the inauguration, quoting a Brazilian proverb, “where the wind goes to come back.” He recalled the whales lunging for his camera like “playful dogs, because they are so curious.” It is there he encountered, on tiny Zavodovski Island, a million penguins. “In the past, the only animal I photographed was us,” he said.
In Genesis, Salgado introduces us to indigenous peoples who, he says, have “real links to nature”: The nomadic Nenets in Siberia, the San people of Botswana and the Kuikuro of Amazon. Salgado invited their tribal leader, Afukaka, to Paris for the inauguration of Genesis. Speaking to the assembled journalists, Afukaka said his people might disappear because of dam building and the scarcity of fish. He cursed soybeans – Brazil is now the world’s largest producer – because soybean production has created air pollution in the Pantanàl.
More perhaps than any other photographer of our time, Salgado has provided a window on the world of the poor. Workers is the story of manual laborers in 26 countries that took seven years to complete, while Migrations, a six-year project, documents the displacement of people in 35 different countries – by wars, famine, environmental degradation and overpopulation – and the rise of megacities like São Paulo and Mumbai. His most famous pictures are of Brazil’s Serra Pelada gold mine, a human anthill formed by thousands of workers moving ore by hand. “For a long time I was very concerned with the distribution of wealth on the planet,” said Salgado, “and I come from a Third World country so I photographed this. Today I’m very concerned about the environment.”
Salgado says that Genesis was a personal voyage of discovery inspired by his childhood spent in a forest in Brazil, where he grew up with his seven sisters and cattle rancher father. When he inherited the farm many years later, it was a wasteland. He and his wife planted an estimated two million trees and slowly the native birds and animals began to return. Today, his land is a nature reserve. The experience inspired him to explore the earth’s unspoiled corners. He was surprised by what he found. Our earthly paradise is in danger but not yet lost: “Fortyfive percent of our planet is still what it was at the beginning…I am also much more hopeful about the future of the planet after this project than I was at the start.” 247 A