Sebastião Salgado, Genesis PDF

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Sebastião Salgado’s Genesis Nuno Pinheiro – CIES-IUL Sebastião Salgado’s exhibition Genesis is on an international tour accompanied by a very well produced and printed book. I visited the exhibition in Lisbon and profited of the advantages of reading it in Salgado’s native language. I must recognize...

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Sebastião Salgado, Genesis Nuno A Pinheiro

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Sebastião Salgado’s Genesis Nuno Pinheiro – CIES-IUL

Sebastião Salgado’s exhibition Genesis is on an international tour accompanied by a very well produced and printed book. I visited the exhibition in Lisbon and profited of the advantages of reading it in Salgado’s native language. I must recognize certain sympathy for Salgado, not only because we do share the same native language. I was greatly impressed by his 1980’s Sierra Pelada images, and the work following. Salgado seemed to be one more in a tradition with his roots on Jacob Riis work on New York slums, very much like these earlier photographers, Salgado didn´t started as a photographer, but with an economy degree. He was a political exiled and an opponent to the ferocious Brazilian dictatorship. From around 2000 Salgado’s work began shifting from focus on human issues and problems to nature in a rather biblical way. Genesis is following Exodus, even if Apocalypse could also be a title, perhaps more appropriate. This change in concern is rather interesting, as it does not means human problems are ended, or ending. On the contrary, it would not be too difficult to Salgado to find new motives for its photography in the slums of his native Brazil, in the overexploited workers of Chinese factories, refugees drowning in the Mediterranean, or even in the unemployment high rates of Southern Europe. The issue is that conservationism became more popular subject than human tragedy. Maybe we are too tired of images of war, poverty, and death and just want nature and animals. According to the biblical title of the exhibition, most images tend to be of biblical proportions, or at least overtones. It is a powerful and epic nature, not an endangered planet. Animals are healthy and plentiful, rivers and mountains are beautiful and unpolluted. Skies are always dramatic, as if in some biblical episode. Landscapes owe to Ansel Adams, some roots are photographed in a Weston like image, penguins slide an ice mountain in a Cartier Bresson like composition. Indigenous people portraits evoke Edward S. Curtis, and I suspect, might have a similar production process, at least, like Curtis photographs, they do not underline the dangers many communities are enduring. A father and a son are photographed in an African landscape. They are clothed in more real than typical outfits. There are people, there is environment, however the thundering sky not only ads a pictorialist overtone, but also distracts from the human figures. And there is a lot of thundering over done skies.

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This exhibition is about how beautifully is earth as a natural environment, how beautiful a “primitive” way of living is (if it still does exist); it is not about how nature is endangered, how species are being extinct, how natural habitats are being destroyed. Salgado is now widely popular; this exhibition has reached by now to a two million people audience. Most people will be happy with them, they are beautiful and grand. They are not shocking or offensive. However, they are far from the great photographs Sebastião Salgado made in the 1980’s, those are the images he will be remembered for.

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