1. 3rd
Eso European Sections CIL Salgado exhibition activity 2
Read this interview to Sebastiao Salgado published in the Daily Telegraph in 2013
Sebastião Salgado: A God’s eye view of the planet -
interview Photographer Sebastião Salgado talks to Sarfraz Manzoor about a life of looking from behind a lens.
By Sarfraz Manzoor 3:24PM BST 12 Apr 2013
Sebastião Salgado, one of the world’s greatest living photographers, did not take his first picture until he was 26
years old. By then he had long since left his native Brazil: first for Paris, to study for a doctorate in economics,
then London where he was working as a macroeconomist for the International Coffee Organisation. One day, his
wife Lélia, an architecture student, brought home a Pentax camera. “The first time I looked through it I knew I
had found a new way to relate to things,” Salgado tells me. We are talking in the basement offices of his
photographic agency, a former coal warehouse in Paris. “It was so fantastic to be able to freeze a moment and then
to have it in my hands. From that moment photography became my life.”
Salgado spoke four languages but it was in photography that he found his mother tongue. Throughout the
following three years he would take his camera on work assignments to Africa before finally quitting his job to
turn professional 40 years ago. Yet while his occupation changed, Salgado’s preoccupations did not: for the past
four decades he has employed his camera to explore questions of politics, economics and inequality with
photographs of ferocious power and beauty. “Photography is not objective,” he tells me. “It is deeply subjective –
my photography is consistent ideologically and ethically with the person I am.” He picks up a scrap of paper.
“One photograph takes one 250th of a second to take,” he says, writing down the fraction with a pen, “So if I have
an exhibition that has 250 pictures, that is just one second! I have just one second to tell a story.”
Salgado’s latest story has been eight years in the making and it has taken him to more than 32 countries and some
of the most remote places on the planet. Genesis, the title of both an imminent exhibition of his photographs at the
Natural History Museum and an accompanying book, is Salgado’s mission to capture those parts of the planet
least touched by mankind. The title refers not to the Bible but to Salgado’s desire to photograph the air, water and
fire that gave birth to life.
In person, Salgado, a wiry 69 year-old with a perfectly hairless head, is a humble man – but his work can seem
like a God’s eye view of the planet. The pictures in Genesis swoop from giant tortoises in the Galápagos Islands to
mountain gorillas in Rwanda, skim past Siberian nomads and the ice fields of Antarctica past the ravines of the
Grand Canyon and towards the mountains of northern Ethiopia. “You can sit in your house and be a great writer,”
says Salgado. “But with photography the story is outside the door. You have to go and you have to go far.”

2. Salgado began shooting Genesis on film but switched to a digital camera because of what he calls the “disease of
airport security” – the damaging effect that Xray machines can have on traditional camera film. He says the
images he now creates are better than those he took on a film camera, but he is wary of the temptations of digital
photography. “I don’t look at the photographs immediately after I take them,” he says. “I photograph like I always
did by taking photographs and then printing out contact sheets. Some photographers take thousands of pictures
and delete most of them – I delete nothing. It is important that I stay inside the pattern that I have always
followed.” That may also explain Salgado’s decision to photograph only in black and white. He says it is because
“greys are not a distraction – if I was to photograph this table, this red book would distract you from everything
else in the image. The red takes all the power away.”
Salgado began Genesis in the Galápagos, where he tried to photograph a giant tortoise. “I stood up to take the
picture and the tortoise became shy and walked away,” he says. “So I had to get on my knees and lower my
shoulders and it was only when I was at the same level as the tortoise that it would let me take photographs. It was
then that I learnt that it was important I respect other species in the same ways I respected my own. This is not
dead nature I was photographing.”
In the past Salgado has explored the consequences of industrialisation and globalisation on the underprivileged.
For his book Workers he spent six years in the late Eighties and early Nineties travelling to 23 countries to
photograph miners, tea pickers, fishermen and others involved in large scale industrial manual labour. He
followed that with Migrations, for which he travelled to 35 countries to document the people who abandon the
countryside for the cities: Mexicans smuggled into the United States; Jews leaving the Soviet Union; Africans
risking their lives to reach Europe.
“By the time I finished Migrations I had seen our species being so tough and brutal and aggressive I became ill,”
says Salgado. He was struck down by an infection that caused boils to erupt all over his body. The doctor
instructed him to return for a period of recuperation to the farm in Brazil where he had grown up with his seven
sisters and cattle rancher father. The farm, ravaged by erosion and drought, was suffering a sickness of its own.
“My wife said to me, ‘You are always telling me you grew up in paradise, but now this place looks hell’,” Salgado
recalls. “She said, ‘Why don’t you try to build a rainforest and return it to how it was?’.” The couple set about
planting trees – he estimates they have planted almost two million – and found that slowly the native birds and
animals began returning to the land. It was seeing this proof of nature’s capacity for renewal that inspired him to
embark on Genesis.
It is tempting to look at Salgado’s images and imagine the photographer, noble, heroic and alone, as he treks with
tribesmen, swims alongside whales and sails past glaciers, thousands of miles from any other soul. But, in truth,
Salgado was rarely alone. “Sometimes I have an assistant with me and a few local people, and other times I could
have 20 people with me,” he says. “The hero in our society is the lonesome cowboy, the individual, but in order to
be an individual you need a lot of people around you because on your own you can’t do anything.” On more than
half the trips he conducted for Genesis, he was accompanied by Lélia, his wife of almost 50 years, with whom he
runs the Amazonas photographic agency.
Salgado has described Genesis as a “love letter to the Earth and to the resilience of nature” and it is impossible to
look at the photographs and not wonder whether Genesis is an elegy as well as a hymn. “I did not do Genesis as a
journalist or an anthropologist or as a biologist,” he says. “I did it for pleasure. It was my idea of fun. To do a two
month walk or to go to the Himalayas and Antarctica gave me a huge amount of pleasure and I want to share that.
But I am also much more hopeful about the future of the planet after this project than I was at the start. “I don’t
think that my pictures on their own can do anything, but together with all the that is now available, they may be
able to add something.”
Genesis will further cement Salgado’s reputation as one of the most significant photographers of his age but, he
says, “the biggest danger for a photographer is if they start thinking they are important”. Speaking in 2005 when
he had just begun on Genesis, Salgado told an interviewer that it would probably be his last great photographic
project. Has he changed his mind, I ask. Salgado shakes his head. “When I started Genesis I was 59 and I thought
I was an old man,” he says. “But now I am going to be 70 and I feel fine so I am ready to start again. Life is a
bicycle: you must keep going forward and you pedal until you drop.”
The exhibition Genesis is showing at the Natural History Museum, London SW7, (020 7942 5000) from April 11.