Sebastião Salgado: Magnum Opus
Flowers Gallery, London
16 March - 15 April, 2023
Greater Burhan Oil Field, Kuwait, 1991
Platinum-palladium print, 90 x 120 cm
© Sebastião Salgado/nbpictures, courtesy of Flowers Gallery
“When I take a photograph, I engage my entire cultural, human and social heritage. It is my life, my personality, my way of seeing the world that stands before what I am photographing. With all this and my sense of perception, I can compose an image. A photograph is taken in a fraction of a second, but you need a whole life in order to create it.” - Sebastião Salgado
Flowers Gallery presents a solo exhibition by Sebastião Salgado, presenting selected works from his new series of platinum-palladium prints. The photographs in Magnum Opus are representative of some of Salgado’s major works, representing almost five decades of photographic expeditions around the world.
The selection of images, made by Sebastião Salgado and Lélia Wanick Salgado, include works from his two most recent series, Amazônia and Genesis, both of which reflect Salgado’s sustained investigation of some of the most remote areas of the planet, and concern for the preservation of the natural world. These are shown alongside earlier works from the acclaimed Other Americas series, chronicling his journeys through rural Latin America; Sahel, which captured the devastating effects of famines in Africa; and the photograph Gold Mine of Serra Pelada, Brazil (1986) from Workers, a global six-year project documenting the exploitative realities of manual labour and structural poverty in an industrial age. Also present is the well-known image Greater Burhan Oil Field, capturing the burning oil fields of Kuwait in 1991.
This important selection of Sebastião Salgado’s work has been printed using platinum-palladium, a sophisticated archival method of printing with an expansive tonal range and characteristically luminous quality. This is the first time that platinum-palladium works from Magnum Opus is on view in the UK.
SEBASTIÃO SALGADO - Short Biography
Sebastião Salgado (b.1944) is a Brazilian photojournalist best known for his captivating black and white photographs of the natural world and those inhabiting it. One of the world’s most influential living photographers, his work spotlights global issues in relation to labour, nature and climate change. His practice has taken him to over 120 countries, with subjects ranging from workers in the burning oil fields of Kuwait to the breathtaking landscapes of Antarctica.
He is the recipient of numerous accolades, including the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund Grant in 1982; a Foreign Honorary Membership of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1992; and the Royal Photographic Society’s Centenary Medal and Honorary Fellowship in 1993. He was made a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador in 2001, and became a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts at the Institut de France in April 2016.
His work is held in numerous public collections internationally, including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; Tate, London; and the Getty Museum, Los Angeles. He has been the subject of various solo shows at major institutions, including the Natural History Museum, London; the National Museum of Singapore; the Sejong Centre, Singapore; and Prague Castle, Prague.
FLOWERS GALLERY
21 Cork Street, London W1S 3LZ
