Sebastião Salgado. Amazônia

The Library Essay

The Forest Photographed as a World

Sebastião Salgado spent seven years photographing the Brazilian Amazon, travelling by boat, small plane and long walking to reach the forest's interior and the indigenous communities who live there. His black and white makes the region strange again, mountains rising from unbroken canopy, storms assembling over the rivers that the forest itself breathes into the sky, and portraits made with the patience of long stays rather than visits.

Salgado, Brazilian by birth and an economist before he was a photographer, conceived the project with his wife and lifelong editor Lélia Wanick Salgado, who designed the book Taschen published in 2021. It is documentary work with an open purpose, a record of an intact world made in the hope that showing its scale would help keep it so.