If you haven’t seen the work of the Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado, you have until this Saturday to visit the Sundaram Tagore Gallery, in New York, where the exhibition “Amazonia” is taking place.
For more than five decades, Salgado has made it his life’s work to document humankind and nature on photographic expeditions around the world. For this series, he traveled deep into the heart of the Amazon, capturing the unspoiled beauty of the world’s most biodiverse region and its inhabitants in stunning back-and-white images. Salgado, who was born in Aimorés, Brazil, in 1944, initiated the project with the hope that it would serve as a catalyst for raising awareness of the need to protect the Amazon and its indigenous population.
Images from Amazônia have traveled to cities across the globe, including São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Rome, Paris, London, Manchester and Avignon. In the fall of 2022, the California Science Center in Los Angeles hosted the North American premiere, presenting more than 200 large-scale photographs suspended throughout the museum’s 13,000 square feet. The exhibition is scheduled to be shown throughout 2023 in Milan, Zurich, Madrid and Brussels.
In addition to work from Amazônia, the exhibition also shows select work from Magnum Opus, Salgado’s special series of fifty platinum-palladium prints representing some of his most powerful series, including Amazônia, Genesis and Workers. These rare prints, made in Belgium by the printer Salto Ulbeek, were recently presented in a selling exhibition curated by Lélia Wanick Salgado at Sotheby’s. It was the largest curated solo exhibition of photography in the auction house’s history, with 100 percent of the proceeds going to Instituto Terra, the Salgados’ nonprofit devoted to reforestation and environmental education. Sales raised more than a million dollars for the foundation.
Amazônia
By Sebastião Salgado
Where: Sundaram Tagore Gallery (542 West 26th Street, New York, NY)
When: June 15 to July 15