Sebastião Salgado arrives at the Ara Pacis in Rome with 200 photographs. The "Genesis" exhibition, curated by Lélia Wanick, will remain open to the public Until 15 September 2013. It will be presented in world premiere and will take place simultaneously with other major capitals (London, Rio De Janeiro and Toronto).
Genesis is the last great work of Sebastião Salgado, the most important documentary photographer of our time: a passionate gaze, aimed at underlining the need to safeguard our planet, to change our lifestyle, to adopt new behaviors that are more respectful of nature and our surroundings, to conquer new harmony. The world as it was, the world as it is; the earth as a magnificent resource to contemplate, know, love. This is the purpose and value of Sebastião Salgado's latest extraordinary project. Over 200 exceptional photographs on display: from the tropical forests of the Amazon, Congo, Indonesia and New Guinea to the glaciers of Antarctica, from the Alaskan taiga to the deserts of America and Africa up to the mountains of America, Chile and Siberia.
Genesis of Sebastão Salgado is a photographic journey across five continents to document, with captivating black and white images, the rare beauty of our main, unique and precious heritage: our planet. Salgado took the photographs that will be exhibited at the Ara Pacis by searching for those parts of the world that are still uncontaminated, those segments of life still intact, in which our planet still appears in its grandiose beauty and where the elements, the earth, flora, animals and man live in miraculous harmony, as in a perfect symphony of nature.
The exhibition presents a series of grandiose landscape photographs created with the aim of immortalizing a world in which nature, animals and living beings still live in balance with the environment. Another part of the work brings together the photographs depicting animals, imprinted in Salgado's lens through a long process of identification with their natural habitats, the photographer has in fact lived in the Galapagos among giant turtles, iguanas and sea lions.
“Personally I see this project as a potential path towards the rediscovery of man's role in nature. I called him Genesis because, as much as possible, I want to go back to the origins of the planet: to the air, water and fire from which life sprang; to animal species that have resisted domestication; to the remote tribes with so-called primitive and still uncontaminated lifestyles; to existing examples of early forms of human settlement and organization. Despite all the damage already done to the environment, a world of purity, even innocence, can still be found in these areas. With my work I intend to bear witness to what nature was like without men and women, and how humanity and nature coexisted for a long time in what we now call environmental equilibrium”. Sebastiao Salgado.
