Genesis

Knowing Sebastiao Salgado's exhibition 'Genesis' was closing at The Natural History Museum on September 8th, I raced down there the Saturday before last to see it - most unlike me on such a sunny day!

Sebastiao Salgado is a documentary photographer who has explored the displacement and alienation of communities from their natural environments and traditional ways of life as industrialisation has spread. Integral to his work has been his observation of the relationship between humans and our planet.

With Genesis however, Salgado focuses on the natural world for the first time, inviting us to reflect on our own lifestyles and the impact we have on the planets natural resources. This is something that is at the heart of the Natural History Museum's work which has 300 scientists working on projects around the world to improve our understanding of the Earth's diversity in the hope that they can enable and inspire better care of our planet. The photographs document environments that have great scientific importance as well as aesthetic appeal, showing off our planets diversity, something for which we are all responsible.

The exhibition is the culmination of 8 years of travel around the world photographing its remaining pristine environments. 

Most of Salgado's previous work has focused on people, labour and migration though here he has chosen to work with wilderness, plants, animals and people. The reason being he grew up on a big farm in a part of Brazil that used to be more than 60% rainforest though in the early 1990's, when he and his wife Lélia decided to move back, only 0.3% of it remained. Since then they have planted a forest which now has almost 2 million trees. 

Genesis is Salgado's way of presenting the planet in his language, 'Photography.' The exhibition is divided up into 5 sections, Africa (my favourite), Planet south, Amazonia and Pantanal, Northen Spaces and Sanctuaries. Most of which depict extremely unforgiving and inhospitable environments, focusing on traditional lifestyles that enable their inhabitants survival. Salgado wanted to experience living with people with real links to nature, illustrated through his photos of tribes in rain forests and the Nenets in Siberia. We and the natural world are so closely tied together though the majority of us live in cities completely cut off from it, managing to do it more harm than good, something Salgado is desperate for people to become more aware of.