To the brink and back

At the turn of the millennium, famed Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Salgado made up his mind to go back in time. The 70-year-old, well-known for his marathon photo projects on gritty social issues such as migrant communities and manual labourers, had set his sights on a new mission - to document a world and a way of life as it was in the beginning, where man lived in and with nature as one.

His quest to capture the pristine beauty of the world became an epic 12-year project titled Genesis.

He spent four years on intense research, planning and fund-raising to meet the project's budget of €8 million (S$13.8 million).

In the following eight years, he made perilous expeditions to 32 remote countries and regions where he faced extreme climates and diets, and a few close shaves with death.

It was anything but a walk in paradise, but the hardbitten photographer never gave up.

He tells Life! ahead of the Asian premiere of Genesis at the National Museum of Singapore on Saturday: "I had a big motivation to do this story and I was willing to accept anything."

The source of his quenchless drive: a visceral experience of the marvellous resurrection of 810ha of forest land that his family owns in Brazil.

Salgado, who was largely based in Europe, returned to his childhood home in Brazil in 1998 after completing a gruelling photo project, Exodus, on people fleeing genocides. The brutality he witnessed on the job had sickened him thoroughly and he sought respite in the familiar.

The verdant rainforest that gave him great pleasure as a child, however, was no longer - industrial activity had turned it into barren land. So with his wife, Lelia Deluiz Wanick, 66, they set about planting trees to reforest the land, determined to return it to its former lushness. The transformation came quickly.

He says, his voice rising with excitement: "We saw the coming back of nature, the water, the birds, the mammals, the crocodiles, everything came back. And that gave me a wish to photograph again, but to photograph nature, what was pristine in the planet."

He had stumbled on some of these secluded, little-known pockets of Eden while working on past photo projects, including a spectacular habitat of gorillas in an area bordering Rwanda and Congo, and he knew he had to return to these "incredible places" to photograph for Genesis.

He also conducted in-depth research in the archives of non-profit environmental organisation Conservation International in the United States and Unesco's World Heritage Centre in Paris, to identify places where nature remains unsullied and human communities untouched by modern-day progress.

That was the first of many steps taken to create Genesis.

Together with his team of nine at Amazonas images, a Paris-based press agency he set up in 1994 to manage his work, he also had to seek permits from various authorities to enter inaccessible locations and find anthropologists or linguists working with tribes in the areas who were willing to broker introductions and spend up to three months on the expeditions as translators.

Each trip also required elaborate route-planning, coordination of manpower and, sometimes, arrangements for emergency help to be on stand-by.

For example, on an expedition to north Ethiopia where Salgado walked 850km over hilly terrain that had not been crossed by man in recent times, an Ethiopian marathon runner had to be roped in to help carry fragile equipment and arrangements had to be made for helicopters to be on hand for any emergency. Fortunately, there was none.

But there were narrow escapes in the eight years, from ground that gave way easily underfoot in a mountainous region in Venezuela because of soft soil, to a steep, snow-covered hill in Argentina that he crossed alone and nearly slipped and fell.

Once, he was in Botswana photographing wildlife from a helicopter when his camera equipment caused his safety belt to come undone. "I was about to drop from the helicopter," he says, "when my assistant grabbed me and brought me back in. Phew."

Beyond close shaves with danger, he also had to overcome tests of endurance. The 47 days he spent photographing a group of Nenets, an indigenous people in northern arctic Russia, and the 7,000 reindeers they were herding, were particularly memorable. He says: "It was incredible in that it was very difficult in those temperatures, varying between minus 45 deg C and minus 35 deg C. As a Brazilian going to this very cold place, I was afraid. You're trapped with ice around you all day long."

It did not help that the many layers of clothing he brought with him were useless against the cold. The Nenets, noticing how cold he looked on the second day, gave him coats made of reindeer skin. "The way they made it, you are always hot and it was possible for me to stay outside for eight hours a day with them."

The diet also took getting used to. He says: "Every four to five days, they kill a reindeer by strangulation. Then they open the reindeer, take out all the intestines immediately and everyone sits around with a small cup and drinks the hot blood of the reindeer. After that, they slice the heart, liver, kidneys and eat them straightaway." The rest of the meat is cooked, stored in snow and consumed over the next few days."

While the experiences were novel, they did not surprise the well-prepared Salgado. He says: "You must know where you are going and you must read a lot beforehand. You must be really prepared for the place you believe in and have real pleasure being there because for a project like this of eight years, if you don't have a deep sense of identification with it, you cannot do it, you cannot hold out in a place for months living in small camps, sleeping in hammocks.

"And you ask me about food? In reality, you eat with your mind. Your mind must be prepared for what you are going to be eating."

The journey, though, did bring unexpected epiphanies. For example, he was amazed by the placid bond between the Nenets and their bitter environment.

"I was asking the questions every day, 'What will happen tomorrow? How will I survive in the middle of this cold weather?' And for them, it was so normal, so natural."

He adds: "The Nenets travel with minimal stuff because they cannot bring with them many things, which are carried by the reindeers, and I learnt from them the concept of what is essential."

For him, it would be his two bags of photography gear, each weighing 25kg and packed with two cameras (he uses Canon EOS 1DX) and two spares, an assortment of camera lenses that he needs, solar panels to charge his batteries and a few camera repair tools.

Film negatives would have been in those bags too, until 2008, when he switched to working with digital cameras. It was a pivotal change that came as he found himself close to giving up on Genesis.

Tightened airport security in the years following Sept 11, 2001, subjected the film negatives he carried to multiple X-ray screenings.

"Once, when I left Sumatra for Paris, I crossed seven X-rays. It's no problem to put your film through an X-ray once, but after two or three times, it starts to affect the film... it became hell. For a moment in 2008, I might have given up Genesis."

But he adapted quickly to the new technology and the transition made travelling through airports a breeze. He says: "At the end of the digital process, I finish off with one negative and we get away with having exactly the same quality or probably better than when I photograph directly with film."

What also remains unchanged is the grainy filmlike quality of his black-and-white images, a signature since his early days with news photography agencies in the 1970s, where high-speed film used to capture fleeting moments resulted in a grainy look.

Salgado, a former economist turned self-taught photographer who works only in natural light, says: "I introduce the grain of the film that I used to work with into the digital work because I was made with it. For me, the look with this grain is complete and it gives an aesthetic quality to my pictures that makes it special.

"Some times people say, 'Oh, you create a kind of pattern'. But it's not a pattern, it's a film that I've worked with my whole life and this film dictates the pattern."

This timeless poetry sweeps across the 245 images in the Genesis exhibition, which was curated by his wife.

The National Museum of Singapore's director Angelita Teo, 42, says: "Photography is an especially powerful way of preserving and presenting the world in an ever-changing landscape and... what is special about Salgado is that beyond displaying the beauty of our places and peoples, his works call for a greater awareness of communities and environments in other parts of the world. For example, this exquisite Genesis showcase is also a reminder to all of us to preserve our unspoilt land and seascapes, and protect the natural sanctuaries, ethnic communities and animals."

Separately, a body of works by Salgado, including images from Genesis as well as his earlier photo projects, will be on show at Sundaram Tagore Gallery in Gillman Barracks from May 20 to July 6.

While some critics and viewers of the Genesis exhibition, which opened in Europe last year, may charge that the heightened majesty and fragility of the images romanticise nature and man, Salgado remains nonchalant about their reactions.

He says: "Each photographer takes an image in his own way. You photograph with your past, your future, your religion. I photograph my way, I have not two ways to photograph.

"If people like it, they like it. If they don't like it, they criticise, but that is not my problem."

Neither is he interested in being seen as an artist with a message, although Genesis points to a way to turn back the clock on a relationship between man, earth and wildlife that has been largely lost with urbanisation.

Salgado, who just returned last week from photographing a new series about Indian tribes in the Amazon, is self-deprecating about his work.

He says: "I'm nothing, I'm just a photographer and it's a big privilege to be a photographer."

View It

GENESIS
Where: National Museum of Singapore, 93 Stamford Road, Basement, Exhibition Gallery 2
When: Saturday to July 27, 10am to 6pm daily
Admission: Free

MORE ABOUT SEBASTIAO SALGADO

1944: Born in Brazil, in the small town of Aimores, the sixth of eight children and only son in a family of cattle ranchers

1968: Received a master's in economics from the University of Sao Paolo and Vanderbilt University

1967: Married Lelia Deluiz Wanick. They have two sons - Juliano, 40, and Rodrigo, 34

1971: Received a doctorate in economics from the University of Paris. Took his first photographs with his wife's camera, which she used for her studies in architecture

1973: Left his job as an economist at the International Coffee Organisation to become a full-time photographer. He worked freelance before joining photography agencies such as

Sygma, Gamma and Magnum Photos

1982: Received the Eugene Smith Award for Humanitarian Photography in the United States

1986: Received Photojournalist of the Year Award from the International Center of Photography in the United States (and again in 1988). Launched his first book, Other Americas, on the Indians and peasants of Latin America; and a second one,Sahel: Man In Distress, on the drought-stricken Sahel region of Africa

1993: Produced Workers, a seminal project comprising a book and touring exhibition based on photographs he took in 23 countries between 1986 and 1992, which document the end of large-scale industrial manual labour

1994: Set up Amazonas images, a Paris-based agency that handles his work exclusively

1998: Set up Instituto Terra, a non-governmental organisation and environmental institution to restore a part of the Atlantic Forest in Brazil, which has since turned into a nature reserve

2000: Produced Migrations, an iconic photo project comprising a book and touring exhibition based on pictures taken between 1993 and 1999 in 43 countries that document the mass migration of people such as refugees, exiles, landless peasants and orphans

2001: Named a Goodwill Ambassador of the United Nations Children's Fund

This article was published on April 22 in The Straits Times.

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