On the Cusp of Times: Sebastiao Salgado

Uma Nair

Genesis, by internationally renowned photojournalist Sebastião Salgado, is an eight year photographic expedition revealing the raw untouched beauty of thirty-two different locations around the planet. Uma Nair reviews how the exhibition bequeaths life to the dead ‘man-nature’ sentiment.

When William Blake wrote his precious Auguries of Innocence and began with the words:”To see a world in a grain of sand,and heaven in a wild flower…”he was talking about the synonymous aspect of man living in harmony with nature.He was talking about how man and nature are one. He was talking about heaven and earth and man’s role in the ways of seeing God’s creations and being ‘Blaksian’ in a world throbbing with selfishness and inequalities harnesses a sojourn that only few can traverse. Sebastian Salgado,the colossus of photography in the world, unveils his magnum opus at Sundaram Tagore’s Singapore gallery.It is almost like looking at the citadel of learning in the hands of an iconoclast who melds the magic of black and white in a world crooning over the jarring shades of color.

Salgado is a magician with his work that straddles decades and dulcet dates with humanity and time.Whether he captures the railway station or the gold mine or the leathery tail of the whale or a tribe in Brazil, each image is a nugget of choreographed characters-in which teeming numbers of human echoes emerge as the signature of a habitation. Years ago in 2006 he had spoken about the cry of the depletion of resources, habitat erosion, the scenario of water resources,the destruction of the forests and endemic poverty that outlines many communities in the world.The facets of global crisis became the prime pattern that filled the silent sadness of his many images that stood like a sentinel in the sojourn of sustenance and marginal living. This historic showing brings back the wisdom of his observation and the magnificence of his words. “ But the daily struggle for survival of the majority of humanity and the appetite for comfort and profit of the minority mean that, in practice, these fundamental problems are tackled only superficially. We have lost touch with the essence of life on earth.”