The City of Paris pays a moving tribute to Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado in the prestigious Salle Saint-Jean at the Hôtel de Ville. This exceptional exhibition, featuring hundreds of works and conceived in collaboration with Lélia Wanick Salgado – the photographer’s wife – and the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP), celebrates a deep bond spanning more than 50 years between the artist and his adopted city.

The exhibition invites visitors to rediscover his major emblematic series, bearing witness to the fragile beauty of our planet and the human condition. In addition to their mastery of black and white, the exhibition highlights the couple’s unwavering commitment to environmental issues. The visit ends on an intimate note with works by their son, Rodrigo Salgado.

This epic project is currently on view at Peter Fetterman Gallery, Santa Monica, being scheduled to travel on later this year and next year to major museums in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, London and Rome. In addition to “Amazônia” works from Salgado’s previous reportages, including “Genesis” and “Other Americas” amongst others are also shown.

Salgado is internationally acclaimed for his epic photographic series: For “Amazonia” for example he spent nine years and 48 trips disappearing into the forest for weeks, sometimes months at a time, returning with new stories and feelings of communality.

“When we come to work with these tribes, we come home,” he says.Even if the Amazon in his photographs appears pristine, Salgado rues the rainforest already lost. “For a long time, we’ve built our society based on natural resources. We’ve destroyed,” he says. “We must protect what we didn’t destroy. We must be smart enough to survive.”

Salgado is also well known also for “Genesis”, his second grand project spanning several years in the making. Archaic volcanic landscapes, arctic ice masses, meandering river canyons, mountain chains enveloped in mist, primordial rainforests and endless sand dunes – Genesis is a visual homage in opulent black-and-white photographs. The photographer documents the stunning beauty and rich diversity of intact flora and fauna, as well as indigenous peoples.

46 percent of the land mass on earth is as intact as on creation day, having scarcely changed throughout the history of the earth. Within the space of eight years, Sebastião Salgado has undertaken 32 journeys in these regions in small propeller-driven aircrafts, on foot, by boat, in a folding kayak and a captive balloon.

He has travelled through climatically extreme zones with rough terrain, far away from any civilization. In terms of content, Genesis has been divided into five chapters: Planet South shows the Galapagos Islands with sea lions, cormorants and penguins, as well as wales in the Antarctic and the South Atlantic.

In Sanctuaries, Salgado travelled through isolated zones with a rich diversity of species, such as Madagascar, Sumatra and West-Papua, portraiting the inhabitants of the Mentawai Islands, as well as the Korowai tribe. In Africa he moved between big game, undulating dunes, lava and the Okavango River, as well as amidst the Dinka nomads in Sudan.

Sebastiao Salgado // Hotel de Ville // Paris, France // On view through 30 October 2021

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