Eight years, thirty excursions, and thousands upon thousands of exposures later, Genesis by Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Salgado, on view now at the International Center for Photography, portrays the world as it was in the beginning of time. Spanning oceans, continents, and people, Genesis is Salgado’s photographic love letter to the planet, expressing a devotion, pure and deep, to the beauty, majesty, and mystery that remains. Salgado notes, “Some 46% of the planet is still as it was in the time of Genesis, we must preserve what exists.” Therefore, it is not without irony that the photographs of Genesis chronicles a world without man or a world where man is in alliance with the earth rather than attempting to conquer it.
As with his previous projects of epic scope and depth, Migrations and Workers, Salgado journeyed across the globe on foot, in boats, canoes, small aircrafts, and even in hot air balloons, in order weave together the story of creation and plead against its destruction. Here,he sings the songs of the earth: its lamentations and its exaltations, its eulogies and its elegies, its symphonies and its silence.
These photographs, in black and white, capture the unfolding of life, sometimes slow, sometime fast, in some of the most remote corners of the earth. It is a world of contrasts: propinquity and distance, calmness and chaos, survival and extinction and yet, despite all of its contradictions, it is a world in harmony with itself.
In Genesis, it is as if Salgado has captured the light from the first day of creation and the light from each day since. These often-heroic landscapes convey that all is right and perfect and true and just in this world. That places such as these still exist attests to the perseverance of our planet. There are places of convergence where mountains meet the sky and where glaciers meet the sea. There are places of divergence where the earth has been split wherein resides the giant sea turtles of the Galapagos and grow the baobab trees of Madagascar. And there are the places in between where an iceberg rises like a fortress in a sea of solitude, at once impenetrable and impermanent, everlasting and ephemeral.
But the viewer need neither stand on the top of a mountain nor at the edge of a precipice to understand all that Salgado means to communicate through these photographs. Perhaps it is the intention of the artist to take us far away in order to bring us closer to ourselves.
For Genesis serves as a reminder that our homes are not always the places where we lay our head to rest but also the planet upon which we tread our feet and that this home must be protected because it is our only shelter.
Standing before each photograph it seems as if the earth has stood still, if only for a moment, and yet, in this stillness, one senses the rise and fall of the tides, the rivers, sometimes black, sometimes white, and sometimes blue, carving their passages through valleys and canyons, and the sands ceaselessly shifting sands across time and space.
But do not mistake this stillness for acquiescence, for in Genesis there, too, are revelations. There is a violence in these images, which speaks not only of the tumultuous nature of this earth, with its constant upheavals and undulations, but also of the danger of humans further distancing ourselves from the source of all things. Thus Genesis becomes a mosaic of the world, attempting to reconnect all of that has been broken with what is unbreakable.
That this planet, desolate and solitary, is also inhabited by life is nothing short of miraculous. In Genesis, we find a Right Whale as it emerges off of the Argentinian coast, the water cascading like diamonds off of its tail, the claw of a marine iguana, sequined and silver, glimmers against the rocks of the Galapagos Islands, and the gorillas of the Virungas, numbering far too few, as they play in the hills of volcanoes. These are the real treasures of our existence
Here, we also learn that there are tribes that still live, as they have for generations, perhaps even millennia, amid the tundra and the bush, amongst the animals who provide them with nourishment and warmth, and beneath the skies above, never forsaking the traditions of their past in order to partake in the very things that may destroy their way of life and the life of this planet.
It is in the portraits of Genesis where the true beauty of nudity is discovered, found in the gentle curve of an exposed breast, in genitals shrouded in gourds, and in men, women, and children, bare of bottom, yet adorned in golden bangles, beaded necklaces, and feathered headdresses.
In the Surma village of Regia in Ethiopia there are men whose bodies boast of the ritualistic scarification of their skin. These are the only scars made visible by Salgado. The real scars, the ones from which the earth may never heal, remain invisible beyond the frame.
What makes Genesis successful is not its lack of accusations that what was may not always be, but rather its compassionate counsel to reach for and hold onto what is; what is beautiful, what is sacred, and what still exists.
From the frozen lands of the Arctic Circle to the deserts of Namibia, from the jungles of Papua New Guinea to the glaciers of Alaska, Salgado measures all that remains against all that has been lost. If Genesis is a reflection of life as it was in the beginning then reflect we must on how it will be at the end. So, let us be not proud like the lion but let us be like the elephant and never forget that there is still beauty and magic and wonder in this world and that this world is indeed worth preserving.