Sebastiao Salgado inaugurates the new Milanese exhibition space "Palazzo della reason Photography" in Piazza dei Mercanti adjacent to Piazza Duomo. The "Genesis" exhibition in Salgado will be open from 27 June to 2 November 2014. Palazzo della Ragione project Photography enriches and integrates the exhibition program of the Municipality of Milan with a stable destination as an exhibition space dedicated to the art of photography: the he initiative was made possible thanks to the impetus and will of the Municipal Administration and the collaboration of Civita, Contrasto and GAmm Giunti.
“With this exhibition we inaugurate Palazzo della Ragione as a space dedicated permanently and exclusively to Photography – declared the Councilor for Culture Filippo del Corno – and we offer an indispensable contribution to deepening the theme of Expo 2015, which in Milan will question all of humanity on the future of sustainability for our planet".
Powerful in its essential purity, the message of Genesis is in fact incredibly topical, here and now, in the months of preparation for the EXPO, while the city of Milan and the country are reflecting on the sustainability of energy projects and on the essential need to live in a more harmonious relationship with our environment, starting with the theme of food. In the coming months, Milan will be the nerve center of world attention for these issues.
A project that began in 2003 and lasted 10 years, a song of love for the earth and a warning to men, Genesis by Sebastião Salgado represents an important contribution to this debate. With 245 exceptional images that make up an enchanting black and white photographic itinerary, the exhibition tells the story of the rare beauty of the unique and precious heritage we have: our planet.
Genesis is divided into five sections that retrace the areas in which Salty he made the photographs: The Southern Planet, The Sanctuaries of Nature, Africa, The Great North, the Amazon and the Pantanàl.
The exhibition itinerary presents a series of photographs (including many of landscapes) made with the aim of immortalizing a world in which nature and living beings still live in balance with the environment. A part of his work is aimed at animals that are imprinted in his lens through a long process of identification with their habitats. In fact, Salgado lived in the Galapagos among giant tortoises, iguanas and sea lions, traveled among zebras and wild animals that cross Kenya and Tanzania, responding to nature's annual call to migrate.
Particular attention is also paid to the still virgin indigenous populations: the Yanomami and the Cayapó of the Brazilian Amazon; the Pygmies of the equatorial forests of northern Congo; the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert in South Africa; the Himba tribes of the Namibian desert and the more remote ones of the forests of New Guinea. Salgado spent several months with each of these groups in order to collect a series of photographs that showed them in total harmony with the elements of their habitat.
The images of Genesis, in powerful black and white, are a testimony and an act of love for the Earth.
A unique journey to discover our environment, Salgado's latest project represents the perfectly successful attempt to create an anthropological atlas of the planet, but it is also a cry of alarm and a warning to try to preserve these still uncontaminated areas, to ensure that, in the times we live in, development is not synonymous with destruction.
Genesis is the search for the world of origins, how it took shape, evolved, existed for millennia before modern life accelerated its pace and began to distance us from the essence of our nature. It is a journey through land and sea landscapes, to discover populations and animals that have escaped the embrace of the contemporary world. Proof that our planet still includes vast remote regions, where nature reigns in the silence of its immaculate magnificence; authentic wonders in the Poles, in tropical rainforests, in the vastness of savannahs and scorching deserts, between mountains covered by glaciers and solitary islands. Regions too cold or arid for all but the most resistant life forms, areas that are home to animal species and ancient tribes whose survival is based precisely on isolation. Photographs, those of Genesis, which aspire to reveal this enchantment; a visual tribute to a fragile planet that we all have a duty to protect.
Sebastiao Ribeiro Salgado was born on February 8, 1944 in Aimorés, in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil. At the age of 16 he moved to nearby Vitoria, where he finished high school and began his university studies. In 1967 he marries Lélia Deluiz Wanick. After further studies in São Paulo, the two moved first to Paris and then to London, where Sebastião worked as an economist for the International Coffee Organization. In 1973 he returned with his wife to Paris to pursue a career as a photographer. Working first as a freelancer and then for the Sygma, Gamma and Magnum photographic agencies, to then create the Amazonas Images agency together with Lèlia, Sebastião travels a lot, first dealing with the Indians and peasants of Latin America, then with the famine in Africa towards mid eighties. These images flow into his first books. Between 1986 and 2001 he mainly devoted himself to two projects. Prima documents the end of industrial labor on a large scale in the book The Hand of Man, (Contrasto, 1994) and in the exhibitions that accompany its release (presented in 7 different Italian cities). So he documents humanity on the move, not only displaced and refugees, but also migrants towards the immense megacities of the Third World, in two highly successful books: On the way and Portraits of children on the way. (Contrast, 2000). Great traveling exhibitions (in Rome at the Scuderie del Quirinale and then in Milan at the Arengario of Palazzo Reale) also accompany the release of the books in this case.
Lélia and Sebastião have created the Instituto Terra in the state of Minas Gerais in Brazil which has reconverted the equatorial forest – which was at risk of disappearing – a large area in which tens of thousands of new trees have been planted and in which the life of nature has returned to flow. The Instituto Terra is one of the most effective practical achievements in the world of renewal of the natural territory and has become a very important center for the cultural life of the city of Aimorès.
GENESIS. Sebastiao Salgado
Edited by: Lélia Wanick Salgado
Dates: 27 June – 2 November 2014
Venue: Palazzo della Ragione Photography
Milan, Piazza Mercanti, 1
