Sebastiao Salgado: ‘photography on an epic scale’

Associated media

Ian Jones looks at the work of a man working in ‘the grand tradition of earlier photographer-explorers’

The BBC and the Sunday Observer have described the exhibition ‘Genesis’ by Sebastiao Salgado currently on show at the Natural History Museum, London as ‘photography on an epic scale’.  ‘Genesis’ is a collection of over 200 natural history photographs that document the environment we live in today and is the culmination of Salgado’s eight years of travel around the world. Apart from the length of time that it has taken to produce, the exhibition is epic in several other aspects: in both the size and number of photographs, in the range of subject matter and photographic styles as well as the number of countries visited and the two years spent researching potential locations.  Credit must be given to Valerie Hue and Olivier Jamin, the team behind the high-quality printing of these amazing photographs.

The Natural History Museum has made available a large ground floor Gallery space for ‘Genesis’. This has been divided into four separate geographic areas by the clever construction of partition walls. Planet South and Northern Spaces are self-contained discrete areas; a corridor containing ‘Sanctuaries’, ‘Africa’ and ‘Amazon & Pantanal’ weaves between them. 

Salgado explains that ‘Genesis’ is all about beginnings, ‘It is about the unspoilt planet, I wanted to present places that were untouched and remain so to this day’.  While much of the subject matter has been seen before, such as an image of the Grand Canyon viewed from the National Forest Arizona (Utah, USA, 2010); photographs showing lip insertions by the Mursi and Surma tribes are exotic but almost stereotypical.  Nonetheless, there are many subjects that may have never been photographed in detail before.  There are exceptional images of the Zo’e tribes, who insert wooden plugs into the chins of young adult men and women.  The plugs are regularly replaced with larger ones until a plug of eight to ten inches protrudes down from the chin emulating the tapering beards of ancient Egyptian Pharaohs.

Contrasting photographic styles have been applied to African tribes.  The image of a Young Himba Woman near the Kapati River in Marienfluss, Kaokoland (Namibia, 2005) is an exquisite fashion/beauty photograph. The images of the Surma village of Regia during festivities at which young girls are presented as ready for marriage within the Ono National Park, near Maji (Ethiopia, 2007) are similar in style to those of the Victorian photographer Francis Frith, who photographed local people in the Middle East during the 1850s.  In many ways the work of Sebastiao Salgado emulates another Victorian era photographer, Felice Beato, who travelled to Egypt, Malta, Greece, India and China, and he carries on the grand tradition of earlier photographer-explorers.