I went along to see Sebastiao Salgado’s Genesis exhibition at the Natural History Museum on Friday evening. It’s a wonderful and slightly overwhelming set of over 200 photographs of wildernesses around the world, from the antarctic to the wilds of western Russia and the Amazon to rural Africa. If you get a chance, I’d definitely recommend it.
As with much of Salgado’s photography, you find yourself wondering how on earth he created it. The huge black and white prints are unmistakably his style and I started wondering whether he still uses film rather than a digital camera. The answer, apparently is that even Salgado got fed up with the faff of analog camera film:
I photographed with film for many years; now that I work in digital, the difference is enormous. The quality is unbelievable: I don’t use flash, and with digital I can even work in very bad light. Also, it’s a relief not to lose photographs to x-ray machines in airports.
He uses Canon digital cameras and then the files are transferred to analog negatives and processed the way they always have been onto the huge black and white prints. Hence preserving the same signature Salgado style and graininess. Even the greats like to ‘instagram’ their images it seems.
Related articles
- The force of nature (economist.com)
- Sebastião Salgado’s Genesis is an extraordinary study of clarity and detail (metro.co.uk)
- Sebastião Salgado documents world’s wildernesses in new Genesis exhibition (guardian.co.uk)
