Last week I was privileged to go and visit the Sebastião Salgado exhibition at the Science Museum, “Amazônia”. Salgado worked with twelve different indigenous communities over the space of 7 years. There are lots of photographs of the indigenous peoples, depicting their daily lives, as well as beautiful landscape pictures. All the pictures are in black and white. I particularly loved the photographs of the Amazon in the rain.
There are different spaces – the landscape photos are mounted on huge hanging boards in a dimly-lit space, with sounds of the Amazon playing, to create the atmosphere of being in the forest.
In other spaces, different indigenous groups are depicted, with interesting descriptions about their lives and their habits. One group are the Yawanawá, known for their elegant feather work, usually made of white feathers from an eagle, which is a sacred animal for them.
Sebastião Salgado himself is from Minas Gerais, the region of Brazil I lived in and am most familiar with. He founded the Instituto Terra to resuscitate the forest that had previously covered the Bulcão farm, a property belonging to the Salgado family that had been ravaged by deforestation. Since 1998, when the Instituto Terra was created as a non-profit organisation, an area covering 1,750 acres has been reforested and a large number of animals and birds have returned to their natural habitat. Water springs are also being rescued, in an initiative recognised by the United Nations.
A great visit and certainly recommended!
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Stay tuned for our next blog post coming next week!
Rachel
