For six years Sebastião Salgado traveled to the Brazilian Amazon and photographed the incomparable beauty of this extraordinary region.
Don't store avocado like this: it's dangerousFor six years Sebastião Salgado traveled to the Brazilian Amazon and photographed the unparalleled beauty of this extraordinary region: the rainforest, the rivers, the mountains, the people who live there, this irreplaceable treasure of humanity in which immense power of nature feels like nowhere else on earth.
More than 500 pages of photos - strictly in black and white - and surprising texts that offer a penetrating glimpse into an extraordinary world, which survives under an immense threat: it is Amazônia, the latest photographic collection by the famous Brazilian photojournalist Sebastião Salgado.
Last year Salgado launched an appeal to protect and save the Amazon Indians who were at great risk due to the coronavirus, now, with this book, he is striving once again to transmit the power of the Amazon region and to create a change in the its readers to push them to act before it's too late.
For this reason and to fully understand how important the Amazon was, Salgado and his partner, Léila Wanick Salgado, spent six years traveling through the Brazilian rainforest, visiting dozens of peoples such as the Yanomami, the Asháninka, the Yawanawá, the Suruwahá, Zo'é, Kuikuro, Waurá, Kamayurá, Korubo, Marubo, Awá and Macuxi and documenting their intense family ties, hunting and fishing, preparing and sharing meals, the their wonderful talent in painting faces and bodies, the importance of their shamans, their dances and their rituals.
Above all, Salgado has endeavored to show how, while jeopardizing the future of the rainforest, we are also endangering the people who live there: "an irreplaceable treasure of humanity".
For me, it's the final frontier, a mysterious universe in its own right, where the immense power of nature can be felt like nowhere else on earth - he wrote in the book's preface. Here is a forest that stretches to infinity that contains one-tenth of all living plant and animal species, the largest natural laboratory in the world.
A necessary look, therefore, that of Salgado on the Amazon rainforest, where the rich natural resources are an unknown and untapped source of food, medicine, cures and scientific and cultural knowledge. All of this will be lost if the forest is destroyed.
Salgado also teaches his readers the Amazon's unmatched ability to take fresh water for the region. It is the only place on earth where humidity in the air does not depend on evaporation from seawater, the preface says. This water vapor, which results from the hundreds of billions of trees in the rainforest, has a major impact on regional water supplies and the global climate. As the rainforest dries up due to the climate crisis, it will affect the water supply and biodiversity of the region and the people who live there.
To show this critical and endangered ecosystem function, Salgado shot a series on the rains of Amazônia, the “aerial rivers” that bring water and life to the region.
Finally, the Amazon has been called the lungs of the planet. Unfortunately, due to intense deforestation, gold mining and fires, the rainforest has already lost its ability to act as a carbon sink. Instead, it is becoming a "huge carbon bomb," warned Salgado, a dangerous source of carbon on an increasingly carbon-filled planet.
With 20% of Amazon's biomass already lost, any further disruption to its ecological balance will have drastic repercussions far beyond Latin American borders, Salgado wrote in the preface. An unrelated study predicted the collapse of the Amazon by 2064.
In Amazônia, Salgado therefore uses this impending ecological disaster as a backdrop for his own story about the rainforest people. The photographer first arrived on this earth in the 80s. Even then, he had wondered what it would be like to meet people from a very isolated civilization, what it would be like to be in contact with them and to walk with the guardians of the rainforest.
And then, as now, the revelation is one and only one:
If we don't buy products that come from the destruction of the rainforest, there is no more destruction - he told EcoWatch. If we ask our companies not to invest in destruction, if we take care together not to lead the destruction of trees with our actions, we can protect Amazônia. We have to go in that direction for the survival of human beings.
Amazônia is available on Taschen.
Fonte: bags
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