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    Sebastiao Salgado Genesis

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    ushshsjs
    Sebastião Salgado's photography exhibition "Genesis" documents pristine natural landscapes and indigenous communities around the world. The exhibition aims to portray an idealized, biblical version of nature and humanity living in harmony. However, the reviewer notes that Salgado's most powerful work documented human suffering and exploitation, and that avoiding images of environmental destruction and human problems does not mean those issues have ended. While the photographs are beautiful, the exhibition fails to acknowledge the real threats currently facing the natural world and indigenous peoples.

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    Sebastiao Salgado Genesis

    Uploaded by

    ushshsjs
    281 views2 pages
    Sebastião Salgado's photography exhibition "Genesis" documents pristine natural landscapes and indigenous communities around the world. The exhibition aims to portray an idealized, biblical version of nature and humanity living in harmony. However, the reviewer notes that Salgado's most powerful work documented human suffering and exploitation, and that avoiding images of environmental destruction and human problems does not mean those issues have ended. While the photographs are beautiful, the exhibition fails to acknowledge the real threats currently facing the natural world and indigenous peoples.

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    Sebastião Salgado's photography exhibition "Genesis" documents pristine natural landscapes and indigenous communities around the world. The exhibition aims to portray an idealized, biblical version of nature and humanity living in harmony. However, the reviewer notes that Salgado's most powerful work documented human suffering and exploitation, and that avoiding images of environmental destruction and human problems does not mean those issues have ended. While the photographs are beautiful, the exhibition fails to acknowledge the real threats currently facing the natural world and indigenous peoples.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    281 views2 pages

    Sebastiao Salgado Genesis

    Uploaded by

    ushshsjs
    Sebastião Salgado's photography exhibition "Genesis" documents pristine natural landscapes and indigenous communities around the world. The exhibition aims to portray an idealized, biblical version of nature and humanity living in harmony. However, the reviewer notes that Salgado's most powerful work documented human suffering and exploitation, and that avoiding images of environmental destruction and human problems does not mean those issues have ended. While the photographs are beautiful, the exhibition fails to acknowledge the real threats currently facing the natural world and indigenous peoples.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
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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.

    1
    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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