Sebastião Salgado’s Love Letter to the Planet

While documenting the vast and inhospitable continent, he visited Deception Island. There he found a dramatic, almost primeval landscape, home to one of the world’s largest colonies of penguins, and the site of several active volcanoes. In one photograph, Salgado records a tumbling mass penguins seemingly bursting forth from the centre of a crater, hundreds of thousands of birds moving as one. The photograph’s structure comes from the swirling line of the queue of penguins, that cuts across the centre of the composition and threads itself from the foreground into the far distance. The image is one of awe in the sheer numbers of lives recorded in one scene, and the power of their combined presence.

Another image rendered sublime by Salgado’s lens is ‘Iceberg Between Paulet Island and the Shetland Islands’. This photograph sees a castle-like iceberg hang majestically between an inky black sea and a sky heavy with clouds. The colossal scale of the palatial iceberg thrusts upwardly through the composition, heightened by its rendering in pale whites against a brooding sky. The towering shape adds to the sense of otherworldliness, adding to the sense of conflict between man and nature that Salgado’s series suggests. Salgado has described, ‘Genesis‘ as a ‘mosaic presented by nature itself,’ but it is clear the series is not just a romantic contemplation of the sublime, instead, it opens up a discussion about what we have done to the planet and what we must now do to protect it.