Sebastião Salgado isn’t bringing to Brazilian public the images of the Amazon on fire that we have become accustomed to seeing in recent years.
The photographer's black and white Amazon is this grandiose landscape, beyond any human scale, full of rivers that seem to cut through the land and the sky, entangled by a fog that swallows its great hills.
"I hope that my photographs reflect this generosity of the Amazon," he said. An exhibition with his series on the Amazon rainforest will open in February at Sesc Pompeia, in São Paulo. These images have been shown in London, Paris and Rome.
Salgado started photographing the Amazon in the 1980s, but intensified his expeditions in the early 2000s during the "Genesis" project, carried out in untouched places on the planet.
"The National Indian Foundation helped to set up this program. Not the one that is currently run by a police chief, which is an institution that is temporarily suffering a lot," says the photographer.
He says that the destruction of the Amazon began before the government of Jair Bolsonaro, but he also claims that this administration has tried to destroy a number of institutions that preserve the environment.
Translated by Kiratiana Freelon