Sebastião Salgado: my adventures at the ends of the Earth

He has spent his life taking epic, mind-swarming photographs of gold mines, oil fields and genocide. But now Sebastião Salgado is turning his lens on the planet’s last undamaged places

Hundreds of people are swarming up ladders, scaling the cliff-like sides of a gargantuan, man-made pit. Is it a picture of hell? Some kind of spirit photograph showing life in the Aztec empire? In fact, Sebastião Salgado’s photograph captures gold-grubbers pouring up the side of an opencast mine at Serra Pelada in Brazil. One of a jaw-dropping series he took of the crazed gold rush that created this great hole in the Earth in the 1980s, the shot is bizarrely timeless and disorienting. Few photographs have such power – to make you question your assumptions about the world, to show you something unbelievable yet utterly real.

Salgado is a photojournalist who seeks out the most moving, unsettling, perspective-shifting images of life on Earth. From his mind-swarming images of the Serra Pelada gold mine to his most recent epic labour Genesis, which documents the last pockets of undamaged nature and unmodernised peoples on Earth, Salgado shows secrets from remote places: things you thought were lost, crimes you never imagined. There could scarcely be a better choice for a lifetime achievement award from Photo London, an art fair opening at Somerset House this week. In addition to an exhibition of the Genesis prints, it will feature works by, among others, Stephen Shore, Rut Blees Luxemburg, Vik Muniz and Ori Gersht.

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