FEATURE - Salgado looks to pull world's wilderness into focus
Date: 27-May-03
Country: ITALY
Author: Crispian Balmer
Now, approaching his 60th birthday, the celebrated Brazilian is embarking on perhaps his most ambitious venture - one that will take a decade to complete and could prove his final great photographic undertaking.
Rather than viewing it as an ending, Salgado believes it will represent a point of departure for his vision of the world and has called the project Genesis.
Chronicling the last places on earth unscathed by modern man, Genesis will sit alongside his two earlier collections, Workers and Exodus, to complete a groundbreaking trilogy.
"Genesis should logically have come first, but I wasn't mature enough to see what needed to be photographed. Now I am," said the shaven-headed Salgado.
"I'll be 70 by the time I finish work on this and can't imagine that I'll want to start on another major project. That doesn't matter. Everything that comes after the Genesis I have in some ways already photographed," he said.
An international economist by training, Salgado fell into photography by chance when his wife bought a camera in 1970. "I started playing around with it and saw the world in a different light. I loved it."
In 1973 he took the plunge and became a professional photographer, working for different press organisations before being elected to the elite Magnum photo agency in 1979.
He covered wars in Africa and Central America and was on hand to capture enduring images of the attempted assassination of U.S. president Ronald Reagan in 1981.
FIGHTING FOR SURVIVAL
He soon lost his taste for bread and butter agency work of breaking news and pursued a more considered career to raise awareness of third world deprivations.
"I do not judge good from bad," said Salgado, who is based in Paris but has spent much of the last 30 years travelling the world's most under-developed countries.
"I have wanted to show the impact of globalisation. Often we forget that there are millions of people out there who have had to uproot their lives just to survive."
His first truly global undertaking took him to 26 countries between 1986 and 1992 to document the decline of manual labour, recorded in a series of black and white images that were hailed as masterpieces of composition and exposure.
One of the chapters focused on an open mine in his native Brazil where thousands of poverty-stricken prospectors scavenged for gold in deep mud pits. The images portrayed a living vision of hell and raised Salgado's international profile dramatically.
After mass labour came mass migration - a project that took him to 40 countries in six years, during which time he recorded the struggles of people displaced by poverty, famine and war.
What he witnessed - death and destruction in Rwanda and Yugoslavia, misery and squalor in Africa and Asia - led him to question the very survival of our species.
"We are blocked in a sterile debate about the world's problems and as we talk, the problems just get worse."
ON A SMALLER SCALE
In recent years, Salgado has focused on smaller, self-contained projects - for example working with organisations such as the United Nations' children's fund UNICEF to document the campaign to wipe out polio.
He has also worked with Italian coffee maker Illy to document coffee plantations in Brazil for an exhibition just opened in Rome which harks back to his Workers portfolio.
"People living in the big cities can so easily think that coffee is made in the backyard of a supermarket. I wanted to show that it is made by real people in real places."
After the shock of Exodus he and his wife founded the Instituto Terra, an environmental project aimed at salvaging Brazil's Atlantic rain forest, which had been almost completely destroyed by decades of logging and intensive farming.
The institute has planted tens of thousands of trees and is teaching locals how to farm in sustainable ways.
"Around 54 percent of the world has been destroyed or altered by mankind. We must protect the r
