Written by: NiRA
Sebastião Salgado – a professional photojournalist over forty years with a charming personality and passionate love of nature – went to the TED stage unsure of how many in the audience would recognize his face, so he began with something they would recognize: his photos.
Silence captured the audience as his gorgeous collection of pictures were displayed before them, making it clear that Salgado has travelled the world over taking snapshots of the lives of people mostly ignored by western civilization.
His motivational and heart touching segment begins with his own story. Salgado was born in 1944 on a farm, in a Brazil quite unlike the one we know today. According to Salgado, the country was a “paradise” back in those days, with rainforest covering more than fifty percent of the land on which fewer than forty families lived.
But it was not meant to last. At the age of 15, Salgado moved to a new city to attend secondary school and start a new life, where he studied to become an economist. During this time, he also learned about politics and radicalism, and met his future wife, Lelia Wanick.
“I lived totally inside photography, doing long term projects.”
Due to rapid industrialization, Brazil was no longer the place where Salgado grew up. In a search for stability, he relocated to France. It was then that the photographer in Salgado began to bloom, and at the age of 30, it became not only his passion, but his life. “I lived totally inside photography, doing long term projects,” Salgado says about this period of his life.
It was back in the 1990s, when Salgado photographed Migrations – people around the globe uprooted from their homes by poverty, wars, and repression – that he saw people dying and became ill himself. Upon visiting a doctor, however, he was told that he was not sick, but had simply seen too much death. The doctor said, “You are not sick. What happened was you saw much death, you are dying. You must stop. Stop!” He then decided to return home to the farm he grew up on in Brazil.
“You are not sick. What happened was you saw much death, you are dying. You must stop. Stop!”
From 2004 to 2009, Salgado shot his project Genesis, a collection of photographs featuring tribes of people who reside away from the so-called advanced world. The ethereal beauty of the black and white images (below) are again extraordinary.
Salgado then got to the point with his audience. “We should do all that we can to rebuild our forests,” he says, just the same as he has done on his own family’s land in Brazil. The cutting down of rainforests is unbearable for mankind to survive. Trees are the only method by which carbon dioxide is consumed and oxygen is released.
“We should do all that we can to rebuild our forests.”
Salgado explains this point with a comparison: “If you have a lot of hair, it might take two or three hours to dry your hair,” he says, stroking his bald head. “Me? One minute.” It’s a funny moment, but he was making a serious point. “The trees are the hair of the planet,” he says.
He concludes by showing some before and after pictures of his farm in Brazil. What we saw was very disturbing: erosion, dried soil, and arid landscape. But then he shows pictures of just two months ago, with the forest almost entirely regrown. They still haven’t reached their goal of 2.5 million trees, but they have still managed to plant 2 million, with the result a sequestration of 100,000 tons of carbon. It’s an uplifting end to a sobering talk.
An exhibition of 250 images from “Genesis” premieres at the Natural History Museum in London in April, before touring to Toronto, Rio de Janeiro, Rome, and Paris.
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Sources: http://blog.ted.com/2013/02/26/why-we-must-rebuild-our-forests-sebastiao-salgado-at-ted2013/
