Sebastiao Salgado. Genesis

Human (and) nature. Epic journeys to the ends of the earth: Salgado's opus on our planet in its natural state. On a very fortuitous day in 1970, 26-year-old Sebastiao Salgado held a camera for the first time. When he looked through the viewfinder, he had an epiphany: suddenly life made sense. From that day onward - though it took years of hard work before he had the experience to earn his living as a photographer - the camera became his tool for interacting with the world. Salgado, who always preferred the chiaroscuro palette of black-and-white images, shot very little color in his early career before giving it up completely. Having been raised on a rural farm in Brazil, far from civilization and without television, Salgado possessed a deep love and respect for nature; he was also particularly sensitive to the ways in which human beings are affected by their often devastating socio-economic conditions. Of the myriad works Salgado has produced in his esteemed career, three long-term projects stand out: Workers (1993), documenting the vanishing way of life of manual laborers across the world, Migrations (2000), a tribute to mass migration driven by hunger, natural disasters, environmental degradation and demographic pressure, and this new opus, Genesis, the result of an epic eight-year expedition to rediscover the mountains, deserts and oceans, the animals and peoples that have so far escaped the imprint of modern society - the land and life of a still-pristine planet. Some 46 per cent of the planet is still as it was in the time of genesis, Salgado reminds us. We must preserve what exists. The Genesis project, along with Salgado's Instituto Terra, are dedicated to showing the beauty of our planet, reversing the damage done to it, and preserving it for the future. Over 32 trips - traveled by foot, light aircraft, seagoing vessels, canoes, and even balloons, through extreme heat and cold and in sometimes dangerous conditions - Salgado created a collection of images showing us nature, animals, and indigenous peoples in such shocking and intense beauty as to take one's breath away. Mastering the monochrome with an extreme deftness to rival the virtuoso Ansel Adams, Salgado brings black and white photography to a new dimension; the tonal variations in his works, the contrasts of light and dark, recall the works of Old Masters such as Rembrandt and Georges de la Tour. On the earth is instilled a glistening, textured fabric so intricate in its weave that even the most finite details seem to extend to infinity. What does one discover in Genesis? The ancient animal species and volcanoes of the Galapagos; penguins, sea lions, cormorants, and whales of the Antarctic and South Atlantic; Brazilian alligators and jaguars; African lions, leopards, and elephants; the isolated Zo'e tribe deep in the Amazon jungle; the Stone Age Kurowai people of West Papua; nimadic Dinka cattle farmers in Sudan; Nenet nomads and their reindeer herds in the Arctic Circle; Mentawai jungle communities on islands west of Sumatra; the icebergs of the Antarctic; the volcanoes of Central Africa and the Kamchatka Peninsula; Saharan deserts; the Negro and Jurua rivers in the Amazon; the ravines of the Grand Canyon; the glaciers of Alaska...and beyond. Having gone, quite literally in some cases, where no man has gone before, and having spent so much time, energy, and passion dedicated to the making of this work, Salgado likens Genesis to my love letter to the planet.