Sebastião Salgado’s ‘Genesis’ work has been receiving a lot of press recently. I read the article in the British Journal of Photography (BJP) a few months back and then stumbled across his TED talk, but it wasn’t until reading a few reviews of a recent study visit that I was inspired to write something.
Genesis, an eight year long project, is Salgado’s attempt to capture the natural world and the ‘traditional’ societies living in harmony with it. Conceived as an environmental project and an antithesis to the war and suffering he’d documented for much of his life, it’s widely acknowledged as a very ambitious piece of work. BJP quotes Salgado as describing it a “visual ode to the majesty and fragility of Earth”.
The images are all in black and white, and are described by BJP as having a strong ‘pictorialist aesthetic’. I’ve surprised myself this year by enjoying simpler, pictorialist images. I quite enjoy seeing something real that’s been made a bit more extraordinary.
Salgado’s latest work has brought with it some very mixed reviews. In a really well written WeAreOCA article late last year, Jose stated that “Salgado seems to ignore the complexity of contemporary visual language”. But, is it such a bad thing to produce something that’s more accessible and which doesn’t require a visual arts degree to be able to appreciate? He appears to have embarked on the process of documenting our entire planet (or at least the ‘natural’ parts of it), it’s amazingly ambitious and it makes some sense that the work is straight-forward. Or is it just that he has not moved with the times and that these sorts of images aren’t fashionable any more? The photographs I saw in BJP and on his website are memorable and beautiful. As Jose said, they evoke many different emotions and that’s good as far as I’m concerned.
It may be worth noting, that the processing on the images shown in BJP is noticeably different to images in some exhibitions and online. This is something that’s caused quite a bit of controversy and I have to say I prefer the less contrasty images. However, I think this is one area where actually going to the exhibition would be very beneficial.
Regarding the photograph of the “Upper Xingu woman being tattooed”, referred to in Jose’s article (and a few other similar images), well it was certainly taken with a male gaze in my opinion, but this is how we all expect women to be presented in a photograph. I’m not surprised by the way these pictures were taken, but then that’s the point, ‘Genesis’ meets our expectations, it doesn’t challenge them. Instead it reassures us that there’s still a world out there worth seeing and perhaps there’s nothing wrong with that.
Resources
http://www.weareoca.com/photography/cant-make-up-my-mind/
http://www.amazonasimages.com/grands-travaux
http://www.ted.com/talks/sebastiao_salgado_the_silent_drama_of_photography.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2013/apr/14/sebastiao-salgado-genesis-review
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/gallery/2012/dec/07/photography-sebastiao-salgado-genesis
http://umneydoc.wordpress.com/2013/06/19/salgado-and-the-chocolate-factory/
http://amanostudy.wordpress.com/2013/07/02/genesis-2-a-visit-with-the-open-college-of-the-arts/
Lucy's OCA Learning Log 
Hi Lucy, a really nice write up. I also visited this exhibition yesterday although I didn’t know the photographers background before hand. As you mention, the processing of the images was really noticeable in a lot of the images – both good and bad.
In a similar manner, the choice of B&W was quite polorising. I really loved some of them but others I was dying to see in colour.