“I try with my pictures to raise a question, to provoke a debate, so that we can discuss problems together and come up with solutions.” – Sebastião Salgado
Sebastião Salgado presents 亚马逊, a landmark body of work celebrating the beauty and diversity of the world’s largest rainforest.
One of the medium’s most masterful living practitioners, Brazilian photojournalist Sebastião Salgado is renowned for his powerful monochromatic images that articulate, with great eloquence, some of the most important questions of our age.
During the course of his near-five decade-long career, he has traversed the globe, capturing some of the most extraordinary and at times, harrowing scenes imaginable. However, for his most recent project, he looked a little closer to home. Over the course of six years he made a series of journeys through the vast section of the Amazon that covers almost the entirety of northwestern Brazil, and there, worked closely with twelve different indigenous groups to create this landmark body of work.
“For me, it is the last frontier, a mysterious universe of its own, where the immense power of nature can be felt as nowhere else on earth. Here is a forest stretching to infinity that contains one-tenth of all living plant and animal species, the world’s largest single natural laboratory.”
The project comprises hundreds of breathtaking black-and-white images, from dramatic, large-format landscapes, to intimate portraits and more candid photographs of indigenous groups as they go about their daily life. It aims to convey the dramatic beauty, incredible biodiversity, and rich cultural heterogeneity of what the photographer calls “paradise on earth”, and thus highlight the importance of its conservation at what is a crucial tipping point in the fight against climate change.
The project was the focus of an eponymous monograph, published by Taschen last May, as well as an immersive, touring exhibition held in numerous prestigious museums and galleries across the globe including, London’s Science Museum, Philharmonie in Paris, MAXXI in Rome; SESC in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro’s Museum of Tomorrow, where it is on display until January 29, 2023.
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All images © Sebastião Salgado