Sebastião Salgado

AMAZÔNIA

The Exhibition of Sebastião Salgado’s Photographs in Milan

Fabbrica del Vapore
12 MAG – 19 NOV 2023

From 12 May to 19 November 2023, the photography exhibition Amazônia by Sebastião Salgado will be held at the Fabbrica del Vapore in Milan.

More than 200 photographs are on display, depicting the vegetation, rivers, mountains, and people of the Brazilian Amazon. It will be a full immersion in the forest, accompanied by a specially commissioned immersive soundtrack by French Musician Jean-Michel Jarre.

Lélia Wanick Salgado, work and life partner of the photographer, is responsible for the curatorship and scenography of the exhibition. “By designing ‘Amazônia’, I wanted to create an environment where the visitor would feel inside the forest, integrated with its exuberant vegetation and with the daily life of the indigenous people. My idea was to present these images, accompanied by relevant texts, so as to underline the beauty of this nature and its inhabitants and its ecological and human dimension, all of which are so threatened today and are so vital to protect and preserve”, comments Lélia.

For Sebastião Salgado, these images testify to what survives before even more disappears. “My wish, with all my heart, with all my energy, with all the passion I possess, is that in 50 years’ time this exhibition will not resemble a record of a lost world” says Salgado. “Amazon must live on – and, always at its heart, its indigenous inhabitants.”

Sebastião Salgado: Biography

Sebastião Salgado is a Brazilian photographer born in 1944, in Minas Gerais, Brazil. He started his career in Paris in 1973, working as a professional photographer with photo agencies until 1994, when he and Lélia Wanick Salgado founded Amazonas images, an agency dedicated exclusively to his work. Today, this agency has been replaced by the studio Sebastîão Salgado.

Salgado has travelled to more than 100 countries for his photographic projects, which have been published in numerous magazines and books such as Other Americas, 1986; Sahel: l’homme en détresse, 1986; Sahel: el fin del camino, 1988; An Uncertain Grace, 1990; Workers, 1993; Terra, 1997; Migrations and Portraits, 2000; Africa, 2007; Genesis, 2013; The Scent of a Dream, 2015; Kuwait, a desert on fire, 2016, and Gold, Serra Pelada Gold Mine, 2019, and recently Amazônia, 2021. Lélia Wanick Salgado conceived, designed and edited the large majority of his books as well as curated most of the touring exhibitions of these works, presented in museums and galleries around the world.

In 2013, the book De ma terre à la Terre (From my Land to the Planet), a narrative account of his life and career, was published. Some of Salgado’s travels and photographic projects are recounted in the documentary film The Salt of the Earth (2014), co-directed by Wim Wenders and Juliano Ribeiro Salgado. It won the special prize for the “Un Certain Regard” section at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival and the César Award for Best Documentary Film in 2015. It was also nominated for Best Documentary at the 87^th Academy Awards.

International Awards

Sebastião Salgado is a Godwill Ambassador of UNICEF and, among other distinctions, he was named an honorary member of the US Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has received numerous photographic prizes and prestigious honours, such as the Grand Prix National (Ministry of Culture, France), the Príncipe de Asturias Prize for the Arts (Spain), the Medal of the Presidency of the Italian Republic (Pio Manzù International Research Centre, Italy). He was appointed Comendador da Ordem do Rio Branco, Brazil, and Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France (Ministry of Culture). In 2016, Salgado was elected member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts of the Institut de France and, in the same year, France named him Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur. In 2018, he was made Chevalier de l’Ordre du Mérite Culturel by the Principality of Monaco. In 2019, he was elected Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (New York, USA), and was awarded the International Peace Prize of the German Publishers‘ Association (Germany). In 2021, he received the title of Honorary Doctor of Arts of the Harvard University (Cambridge, USA), and was honoured with the Praemium Imperiale Award of the Japan Art Association, considered as the “Nobel of the arts”.

The Instituto Terra Project

Since the 1990s, Lélia and Sebastião have worked together on the restoration of part of the Atlantic Forest in Brazil, in the Rio Doce Valley of the state of Minas Gerais. In 1998, they turned this land into a nature reserve and created the Instituto Terra. The Instituto is dedicated to a mission of reforestation, conservation, and environmental education.

To date, Instituto Terra has created a forest that is home to hundreds of varieties of plant and animal species typical of the Atlantic forest. Since 2010, it has also developed a programme called Olhos d’Água, which works to recover, protect, and conserve the water resources of the Rio Doce catchment area, restoring tens of thousands of springs.