Sebastião Salgado’s Genesis, selections of which are on view at the ROM and Nicholas Metivier Gallery this month, is likely his most ambitious project to date, spanning eight years and 32 countries in pursuit of some truly lofty goals. Genesis seems an attempt to one-up the universality implied by Steichen’s “Family of Man” show as Salgado works to extend the bloodline to include all fauna, flora and mineral matter he encounters. Propelled by moral conviction and an unshaking belief in photography as a medium capable of preservation, study and raising awareness, Salgado fully embraces “the objective camera” to present his unique approach to large-scale documentary work.
I spoke with Salgado in January and was struck by his tendency to never directly address or answer my questions, instead moving forward on a tangential trajectory to unpack more subtle inner logic of his work and life. Salgado is a natural storyteller with a permanent twinkle in his eye; he speaks quickly and with a passion that is steeped in both romance and mysticism. Listening to Salgado speak is a geography lesson with a steep learning curve; his mind moves across the planet entwining all that he has encountered through his 8-year sojourn into an unlikely harmony. What follows is a condensed version of Salgado’s comments.
On the origins of Genesis:
Genesis is very different from most work I’ve done; in the past, I photographed social situations, mostly human situations. One day, I made the decision to tell a story about other animals, because to this moment I had photographed just one animal: us.
The decision also came from the work my wife Lélia and I were doing as a part of our environmental project in Brazil. We were planting a lot of trees, we’ve put about 2 million trees in the ground, more than 300 different local species. We started this project in Brazil on the land that was the land of my parents. When I was a kid, it was a rainforest, but when we started to plant there was nothing there, all was destroyed. We made the decision to put the forest back, starting with my slice of land. In doing this project, we came so close to nature that we decided to go ahead and do a project about the planet, a kind of homage to the planet. We set out to find parts of the planet that were still pristine and to our big surprise we discovered that more than 45 per cent of the planet is still as it was on the day of genesis. We made a selection of a number of places to go; I spent the following eight years photographing in 32 different places around the planet.
On the structure of Genesis:
The show is organized a bit by regions of the planet; we have one chapter that was made in the extreme south of the planet—high Patagonia in Argentina and Chile, low Patagonia in Argentina, the Diego Ramirez Islands, the Falkland Islands, the South Georgia Islands and the South Sandwich Islands. We get a kind of sample of the south of planet.
We have another chapter that we made in the north of the planet that was sourced in the north of Russia because it’s so huge, so pristine. We worked in Kamchatka; we worked on remote islands in the white north of Siberia. In the Yamal Peninsula, I migrated with a group of nomadic people following about 7,000 reindeer inside the Arctic Circle. I worked in an Alaskan arctic refuge, and here in Canada, I worked a lot in Kluane National Park—all this made the north chapter.
We have a chapter in Amazonia, work based in Brazil and Venezuela in which we worked with many different groups of Indians. We worked with one group of Indians in Venezuela and four different groups of Indians in Brazil, creating a big survey of the Amazon that also shows rivers, mountains and the formation of the humidity and rain that comes from this unique ecosystem.
Another chapter focuses on very special ecosystems that we can say are the sanctuaries of the planet: Galapagos, West Papua, New Guinea, Madagascar, and the Mentawai Islands and Sumatra in Indonesia.
These, alongside an African chapter–where I made more than 10 trips to Africa–make the sample of the planet that we call Genesis.
On the experience of making Genesis:
I am not a scientist, I’m not a journalist, but I had a great curiosity to go to see these places. Being able to do this project and see these fabulous places for eight years was one of the biggest gifts that I ever received in all my long life.
I think one of the most remarkable things about our species is our capacity for adaptation; we can adapt ourselves to almost any kind of situation. It was very easy for me to adapt when I went to work with the Nenets in the north of Siberia, though it was extremely cold–minus 40 degrees Celsius for 45 days travelling outside–these nomadic people gave me their clothes so I was not cold at all. These guys have adapted for thousands of years doing these trips, and they know how to dress, how to make shoes, and what to expect. It was fantastic. We wore the same clothes that their grandparents had; 200 years ago, a thousand years ago, people dressed in the same way.
On photography and action:
Photography is really a cross-section of reality, frozen moments that stay forever. They can tell and preserve something, but we also need to take action. What we are doing with our environmental project in Brazil is very important for us because we are, everywhere in the world, very quickly destroying nature, always for the profit of just one species—our species. In the end, all this destruction is not done just by the people cutting forests—they are just agents. It’s not the companies that are breaking the land and taking all the minerals, it’s not the companies that are drilling to get the oil. The people responsible for all this destruction are all of us together.
When you are in a town like Toronto, New York, Paris, or Rio de Janeiro, with all your cars, with huge buildings that are kept cold in the summer and warm during the winter, we use electricity non-stop and everything that we have, we have taken from nature. We are all responsible, and I believe if we want to change something, we must start with ourselves. You can’t accuse the people in New Guinea or the Amazon of destroying the forest if it comes here to be made into furniture that we use. We can’t accuse the companies that are taking minerals out of the earth to produce the cars, the forks, the computers, and the telephones of destroying the planet when we are the ones using these products.
If one day we accept the need to reduce our level of consumption it will be the first step toward protecting our planet. We can do things like we are doing: planting trees, but it’s a small gesture. In order for things to work, everyone must plant trees, everyone must take care not to waste so much water and electricity, and we must work harder to develop enough new technology in order to protect this planet.
On the significance of Genesis:
The thing that was most fabulous in this project was the moment I realized I had been told the same big lie all my life; people say that we’re the only rational species, and it’s a lie, it’s simply not true. Each species is rational inside its species: each species knows how to sing, knows how to communicate. I saw many scenes during these eight years, love scenes, approach scenes, seeing animals behave in a way that we don’t pay attention to. It led me to discover that they are very similar to us and that, in the end, we are all cousins. We came from the same cells, the same base.
What we tried to do with these pictures was to bring a new presentation of the planet; to present the planet mineral, the planet vegetable, the planet animal, putting us as one animal among all the others. I don’t purport that these photographs are going change the world, because what we are doing is so small, but I needed to say: “Hi guys, this my planet, it’s an incredible planet, I’m a part of all this and I respect all this.”
Someone told my story with this very nice anecdote: The forest was burning, a huge fire blazed. One small hummingbird took notice of the fire and was going and picking up a drop of water with his beak and dropping it on the fire and going back for another drop, coming and going in the forest. The other animals laughed and were like “Guy, what are you doing? You see the size of those drops compared to the size of that fire?” And he said, “Yes, I’m doing what I believe to be necessary. If each one of us does it, we’ll have the fire out in no time.”
I say, if each one of us does a little bit, we’ll take care of the problem. I believe we all need to have a sense of responsibility not only toward the social; we must include the environment inside the general discussion and create a real debate. The environment can’t be put aside now. For us these pictures are just a small contribution. We have two books coming out, designed by my wife, we have the show, a film, and a lot of things—but it is just a small contribution.
