Sebastião Salgado - Amazônia
September 1 - October 30, 2021
Opening in Los Angeles with our partner Fetterman Gallery, we are honored to present the first U.S. exhibition of Sebastião Salgado’s latest epic project - “Amazônia”.
Renowned as one of the foremost artist/photographers of our generation Sebastião Salgado trained as an economist before becoming a photographer in the early 1970s. Since then his work has taken him to 120 countries and his consistently iconic images portray a world and its inhabitants facing the challenges of the 20th and 21st century.
Throughout his career, Salgado has achieved a difficult task - imparting dignity and integrity of his subjects without condescension or pity. Salgado's photography addresses and communicates an understanding of social and environmental situations that he actively tries to remedy both in his work and through the proceeds of his picture sales.
For his long-term “Amazônia” project, Salgado began venturing into the Amazon in 1980s, fostering relationships with some of its tribes (of which there are 188 in Brazil alone). He returned to some, like the Yanomami, for decades and enjoyed privileged access to others, becoming the first non-indigenous person to visit every village of the Zo’é people. For “Amazonia” he made 48 trips disappearing into the forest for weeks and sometimes months at a time, returning with new Images and stories and feelings of communality. “When we come to work with these tribes, we come home,” he says.
While the Amazon in his photographs sometimes appears pristine, Salgado rues the rainforest already lost. “For a long time, we’ve built our society based on natural resources which we’ve destroyed,” he says. “We must protect what we didn’t destroy. We must be smart enough to survive.”
In addition to the “Amazônia” photographs, we will have on view key works from Salgado’s previous reportages, including “Gold Mine” (from Serra Pelada) and “Genesis”.