For seven years, Salgado has been working on a vast project called “Genesis”, of which these pictures are a part. He has travelled around the world—to the Galapagos, the Congo, Antarctica—capturing places and lives untouched by modern development. The scale of the project is typical of him. Since the 1970s, when he took up photography after a brief career as an economist, he has specialised in long-term reportage in black and white. “Migrations”, a photo essay capturing people on the move begun in 1993, took him six years to complete. It had 44 international exhibitions, including at the United Nations in New York and the Barbican in London. He has won umpteen awards, but has never focused so intensely on landscapes, as he does here. Born on a farm in Brazil in 1944, he feels “Genesis” is returning him to his own origins. “If I’d been smart”, he says, “this would have been the first project I ever worked on in my life. But it was necessary for me to do all the others to realise I had to do this one.”
Pictured: Between Abune Yosef and Yemrehanna Kristos
“People in this part of Ethiopia often live with their cattle in their houses. It can get very cold—one day during our walk it was -7°C. The heat from the cattle makes the houses quite comfortable”
