Sebastiao Salgado: The Unfiltered Lens

Fascinating interview by Bryan Appleyard with Sabastiao Salagado on the release of his new  book on landscapes and the environment called “Geneis”

In the rainforest everything is backlit. The light streams towards you, silhouetting the trees. Also the Brazilian sun burns, so children are given broad-brimmed hats. They grow up always looking from shadow into light.

“I realised recently that most of my photographs are shot against the light,” says Sebastião Salgado, “and that is why. I was raised in the shadows. The sun injured my nose and it was necessary to have a hat, so everything came to me from light into shadow.”

Salgado’s pictures are among the most influential of our time. In particular, his staggering shots of the Serra Pelada goldmine in Brazil, in which thousands of workers both assault the earth and become one with it, have defined, more vividly than any written account, the effect of industrialisation on the Third World. He has also photographed famines, migrations, the entire global effort of human survival beneath the crushing burden of modernity.

Read all of this essential article here

This is the beautiful book published by Taschen, click on the cover to get the special Amazon deal and pay only £38.24

Images: © Sebastião Salgado/Amazonas Images/nbpictures