Sebastião Salgado: GENESIS

Fantastic book and photos

Loved this book, the images are magical

This inspirational book is worth every penny, even though for this kind of large format art book it is not expensive. The culmination of Salgado's work as a photographer and an activist. By the way, the book was delivered to my home, and I was just unwrapping it when the news came through that he had died. RIP, Sebastião. E obrigado!

The experience of randomly opening the book and viewing two or three, two-leaf, black and white photographs was awe inspiring. The vast expanses of nature revealed to me a massive beauty, grandeur and something Olympian, I felt proud and privileged to inhabit the planet. Additionally, I felt the urge to respect and care for the planet. The often encountered experience of human beings to subjugate the planet looked barbarous compared to the wise attitude of harmoniously cohabiting the planet and ensure the sustainability of its fragile ecosystems. After reading the spare text which seems like a footnote compared with the overwhelming presence of photos in the huge book of over five hundred pages, I felt an empathy with the thinking, emotions and attitude of Sebastiao Salgado towards nature. The book is the result of an epic eight-year expedition by the author to rediscover the mountains, deserts, forests, and oceans; the animals and peoples that have so far escaped the imprints of modern society - the land and life of a still pristine planet. Sebastiao Salgado managed to create a collection of images showing us nature and animals, and indigenous people in breathtaking resplendence. A book to give you joy in viewing nature in all its beauty and variety but also to serve as a sober reminder of our obligation to preserve it.

As the world's greatest living photographer, any collection by Salgado is not to be missed. This is a massive collection - the book is over 500 pages long. Quality of the reproduction, quality of paper etc is excellent - value for money is outstanding. It goes without saying that there are some truly amazing images here and Salgado is a master of light and 'the moment'. This is in effect an elongated essay and ideas behind the seven year project are articulated in the introduction and give much greater weight to the images. This reflects the constant principle which underpins all his is work - his purpose is not to provoke the viewer to admire the beauty of his images but to understand the issues which have provoked them. For all this, my initial feeling on first opening the book was of disappointment - although I wouldn't wish to get my reservations about the production of this collection out of proportion. Salgado photographs in landscape format in the main and the book format is portrait - so the images are predominantly presented across two pages with the aesthetics of the images completely ruined by the ugly divisions in the middle - made worse by the thickness of the book so that the images don't lay flat. This is avoided in a book like Steve McCurry's Iconic Images by using a landscape format - this book stands on its tall end but images are printed across the pages. This might be a matter of the cost of production of course but that doesn't really add up as there are also quite a lot of complicated fold-out pages in the book which usually display a number of smaller images - this must increase costs of production considerably. Actually printing landscape could have cut the book length considerably as most images would have been one page rather than two and the resulting image size of 30cm x 20cm (at least) is plently large enough. So - for me - the format does limit the enjoyment of the images, without reflecting at all on the quality of the photography, for which the word inspirational is inadequate. Anyone fortunate to have seen the exhibition of prints at the Natural History Museum in London - or elsewhere - will have seen the images at their most powerful. There is some excellent background material on the images in a separate booklet that comes with the book and it's a shame that this does not include some photographic details - camera used, some background on the making of a few images outling Salgados thought processes, perhaps an indication of post-processing (perhaps with an acknowledgement to his 'crew'). This sort of context has given a massive new element to the various Attenborough series on TV. So - a book that will grace any collection - but it could (as an object of beauty in itself) have been so much better.

Inspiring picture from a master

After confessing "having lost all faith in the future of humanity" and retiring to his Brazilian estate, Sebastiao Salgado went out to explore the wonders of the world so as to show how it looked like at the time when the Bible was written. Good for him and, above all, good for us ! His exquisitely rendered pristine landscape images put us in direct contact with the Creator. His wife is the editor of this magnificent work of art. She has managed to preserve the spectacular lighting, with deep blacks and endless details in the 3/4 tones, some printed across the fold (which I personnaly don't find objectionable). The paper is semiheavy gloss type which cares for perfect reproductions. I recommend strongly this book as it belongs to the kind of "asset" that should be transmitted from generation to generation.

Salgado is the greatest photographer known to me. Using just black and white film, he can range from sweeping panoramas of the Amazon rainforest to the sweat on a goldminer's back. His pictures draw out such emotion in me it brings a tear to my eye. This book explores those few parts of the world yet to make contact with modern human technology and society. It's a weighty book both literally and metaphorically, choc-a-bloc with powerful images redolent with some primordial vigour we lost in prehistory.