(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Genesis, Sebastião Salgado Photo exhibition, c / o Berlin, 18 / 04-15 – 16 / 08-15 Climate research has long shown that the Earth's climate is changing as a result of human activity. But there is still a lack of decision-making at a high political level, and a willingness to change with each of us. While the geology discussion is about whether we have entered the anthropocene age – a geological epoch named after human imprints on the globe – Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado takes us to places on Earth where humans, animals and plants still live in a sustainable symbiosis. Through its extensive photography project genesis Salgado tries to convince us that Paradise still exists – places where no one has yet tasted the forbidden fruit. These areas we still have the opportunity to preserve – and pictures of Paradis can spur us on to this in ways the numbers in a research report fail, the photographer believes. Life in balance. The Brazilian is perhaps the world's most famous documentary photographer, a former Magnum member and has a number of conscience books on conscience. The award-winning documentary about him, Salt of the Earth by Wim Wenders and Julian Salgado, after touring at festivals around the world, was staged at Norwegian cinemas last week. The film's focal point is Salgado's life project "Instituto Terra" and the very extensive photo series genesis, which has been exhibited at major photographic museums around the world and is now on display at c / o Berlin in Germany. 
Sebastião Salgado and his team have worked with genesis for over eight years, and during this period made 32 trips to areas still untouched by industrialization and modern civilization – where everything is nature. With small aircraft, on foot, in kayaks and hot air balloons, Salgado has traveled to the extremes of our civilization and photographed animals, people and landscapes. The result is presented throughout the first floor of c / o Berlin, where different colors of the walls define the different themes of the project. The blue room shows "Northern Spaces", with herds of reindeer on the Arctic Circle, Kamchatka Peninsula and Alaska – and the people living on the ice with their sleds, dogs and tents. The red shows "Amazônia and Pantalan" with alligators and jaguars, Negro and Juruá rivers running through the rainforest, as well as the nomadic Zo'é people in the jungle of Brazil. "Planet South" shows the Galápagos Islands' diverse wildlife and with sea lions, penguins and whales in Antarctica and in the South Atlantic. "Sanctuaries" show us isolated zones with a rich diversity of species; Madagascar, Sumatra and West Papua, portraits of the inhabitants of the Mentawai Islands, and the Korowa tribe. In Africa we see wild animals, rolling dunes, the Okavango River, and some of the everyday life of the Dinkanomads in Sudan. The pictures are accompanied by information posters that tell us small fragments about the way of life of depicted people and animals – such as the Dinka people in Sudan smearing with the ashes of burnt cow dung to protect themselves from diseases from insect bites. We also hear about the landscape and climate in the different areas.
With small aircraft, on foot, in kayaks and hot air balloons, Salgado has traveled to the extremes of our civilization and photographed animals, people and landscapes.
Back with hope. Sebastião Salgado was born in Brazil in 1944, before globalization, and before the country had become part of a market-driven economy. He grew up on a self-sufficient farm with large rainforest areas. As a young man, he took a master's in economics and was a period activist on the left, but at one point took the photograph of his life, and he began to travel around the world with a camera in his backpack. After working for many years with the projects Workers og Migration he had seen so much suffering, murder and torture up close – including during the Rwanda genocide – that he became ill from it. After a long break from photography, and returning to the farm in Brazil, he began to photograph again, but this time focusing on hope. He found this in landscapes, animals and people who have not yet been part of industrialization and modernity – genesis.
Beauty is not always flawless, even when perfected.
Leila Wanick Salgado, Salgado's life partner, designer, book editor and exhibition curator, writes in the introductory text to genesis an appeal that we must stop ravaging and begin preserving the earth's untouched landscapes. The couple's organization, "Instituto Terra", which has replanted an area of the rainforest around the childhood farm with two million trees and made it a nature reserve, is presented as an example to follow. Gaze. Salgado himself wants his pictures to spark discussion about where the world is heading today. His humanism and dedication to his own projects shines out of everything he does. He is unequaled in craftsmanship; Each photograph has a perfect symbiosis of light and shadow, lines and shapes – a theatrical drama. Salgado has been criticized for using the camera to beautify the world – to always take the aesthetic precedence, even in projects focused on war, migration and escape, or workers' difficult conditions. He has even managed to make beautiful photographic reproductions of even the most horrific human degressions. IN genesis he has turned upside down on his previous approach to the world, and uses his photographic gaze not to tell us about its cruelty and depravity, but about preserving hope. That still 46 percent of the planet is intact, that humans and animals live on a large scale with nature, in the same symbiosis as they have done for countless generations before us. 
Salgado's previous projects have been about man alone; in genesis he juxtaposes people, animals and nature, and approaches these sizes in exactly the same way. In the portrait of a Nenet, a native of northern Arctic Russia, we encounter an unfathomable look; it is as if all instincts and experience accumulated through the lineages are manifested in the eyes of the net. Similarly, we meet the gaze of a hunting jaguar by a river in the Amazon. It is as if this gaze also carries with it the whole essence of the animal: a look across all time and space, which represents something fundamental in our existence with which few in today's civilization are in contact. The beautiful tribute. Faced with Salgado's images, it is impossible not to be captivated. You are overwhelmed by the beauty, the drama and the dedication behind a project genesis'caliber, to the extent that you almost lose your breath. At the same time, the images are so beautiful that they are missing friction – there is no resistance in them. Although Salgado has traveled to the deepest rainforest and outermost iceberg, he still stays on the surface – on photography surface. We look at "the others" with Salgado's beautifying glasses – and are struck by the aesthetic. Everything is perfect. Everything is crisp and contrasting in a world of black and white. Salgado himself calls the project a visual tribute to Earth. Irish photographer Richard Mosse, who has infiltrated armed rebel groups in eastern Congo, has stated that beauty is a direct path to people's emotions and thus the strongest means of influence we have. I think he is absolutely right – but beauty is not always flawless, even when perfect.
Nina Toft is a visual artist and co-editor of DebrisFanzine.com. info@ninatoft.no
