Sebastião Salgado in Siberia

Source: guardian.co.uk

The Nenets of northern Siberia live at temperatures of -35C, wash just once a year and eat raw reindeer liver to survive. Photographer Sebastião Salgado travelled with them.

Eight years ago, at the age of 60, Sebastião Salgado set out on his most ambitious project. The photographer, best known for his painterly portraits of migrant communities and manual workers, decided to document the world’s pristine territories – areas untainted by the brutal grind of industry, exploitation and modern life.

Through his work, Salgado had seen so much horror – in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, he witnessed 10,000 people die in one day in the refugee camps of Goma. The playwright Arthur Miller once described Salgado’s pictures as an act of deep devotion, but the photographer returned from Exodus, a project about people fleeing genocide, with his faith in tatters. “I was injured in my heart and my spirit,” he says. “I came away from this with incredible despair.” So he embarked on Genesis, hoping it would be restorative, a celebration of the world’s natural beauty. (…..)

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