If you haven’t seen the work of Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado, you have until this Saturday to visit the Sundaram Tagore Gallery in New York, where the exhibition “Amazon” is taking place.
For over five decades, Salgado has dedicated his life to documenting humanity and nature through photographic expeditions around the world. For this series, he traveled deep into the heart of the Amazon, capturing the untouched beauty of the most biodiverse region in the world and its inhabitants in stunning black and white images. Salgado, who was born in Aimorés, Brazil, in 1944, initiated the project in the hope that it would serve as a catalyst to raise awareness about the need to protect the Amazon and its indigenous population.
Images from Amazon have traveled to cities around 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, showcasing over 200 large-scale photographs suspended throughout the 13,000-square-foot museum. The exhibition is scheduled to be displayed throughout 2023 in Milan, Zurich, Madrid, and Brussels.
In addition to the work from Amazon, the exhibition also features selected works from Magnum Opus, Salgado’s special series with fifty platinum-palladium prints representing some of his most powerful series, including Amazon, Genesis, and Workers. These rare prints, made in Belgium by printer Salto Ulbeek, were recently featured in a curated sale exhibition by Lélia Wanick Salgado at Sotheby’s. It was the largest solo curated photography exhibition in the auction house’s history, with 100% of the profits going to Instituto Terra, the Salgados’ nonprofit organization dedicated to reforestation and environmental education. The sales raised over a million dollars for the foundation.
Amazon
By Sebastião Salgado
Where: Sundaram Tagore Gallery (542 West 26th Street, New York, NY)
When: June 15 to July 15