Light / Dark mode

Through the Lens: Journey into the Amazon with Sebastião and Lélia Wanick Salgado

Attention shutterbugs, art hounds, and nature enthusiasts: Amazônia: Photographs by Sebastião Salgado has made its Asia-Pacific debut at the National Museum of Singapore! Featuring over 200 images of the Amazon rainforest and its indigenous peoples, the travelling exhibition is an immersive introduction to the work of the world-renowned Brazilian photojournalist and activist. Curated by Lélia Wanick Salgado, Sebastião’s wife and collaborator of over 60 years, Amazônia poses urgent questions about the relationships between art and environment, people and place, meaning and context.

Amazônia at the National Museum of Singapore. Images by author unless stated otherwise.

Amazônia at a glance

For the exhibition, the National Museum’s basement galleries have been transformed into a breathtaking forest of pictures, music, stories, and sensation. Inside, darkness pervades. Fugitive light catches slivers of sky, river, mountain. Monumental black-and-white photographs form windows into a distant world. Suspended above ground and illuminated by hidden spotlights, these images give the impression — as suggested by Lélia herself — that the very landscape emanates light.

Meanwhile, three large, elliptical structures lie nested among Sebastião’s pictures. Meant to represent the living spaces of indigenous tribes, these enclosures contain a variety of portraits, coupled with photos of hunts, festivals, and ceremonies.

The exhibition also includes two niches which reflect its broader social commitments. First, a showcase of acrylic plates from Amazônia Touch, a special publication of Salgado’s photographs designed to help individuals with visual disabilities engage with his work through tactile reading. Second, a record of ongoing reforestation efforts undertaken by the Instituto Terra — an environmental nonprofit helmed by the Salgados — in partnership with Zurich Insurance Group. 

By way of a “local response” to the show, the National Museum has also installed interactive components, suitable for families with young children, adjacent to the exhibition. Anyone concerned with what it means to love, celebrate, represent, champion, and protect the nonhuman world will find something to take away from Amazônia

“Eco Sanctuary,” a kid-friendly companion to the exhibition. Image courtesy of the National Museum of Singapore.

Place and people

Of course, Sebastião’s photographs are the cornerstones of Amazônia. A representative image may be found in the artist’s portrayal of the Anavilhanas, the world’s largest freshwater archipelago:

Sebastião Salgado, ANAVILHANAS. Photograph © Sebastião Salgado; image courtesy of the National Museum of Singapore.

Characteristic of Sebastião’s signature style, striking contrasts reveal the scene’s protagonists of storm clouds, islands, and rivers with dramatic flair. A wide field of view and deep depth of field — meaning that the image captures a large scene, and most of the scene is in sharp focus — disclose the Amazon’s breathtaking scale from an epic aerial perspective (many of the photographs were taken from a military helicopter). Meanwhile, the image’s rich tonal range — referring to a large spectrum of dark, light, and in-between tones — renders the minutiae of forest canopies, island coasts, and riverine reflections in stunning detail. 

In Amazônia, though, place is only part of the story. Walking through the exhibition, viewers will also encounter Sebastião’s intimate portraits of 12 indigenous tribes, deftly interspersed with his landscapes. Accompanying captions by Lélia tell the stories of these communities and their cultures.

What the Salgados are keen to help us imagine, then, is a sense of intimacy with the Amazon and its peoples — however different and distant they may seem at first. During the exhibition tour, Sebastião would often pause before his photographs to enlighten the audience about his subjects, their routines, and his interactions with them. Asked at the Amazônia press conference about what he has learned most from his nine years and 58 trips into the Amazon, he replied: “The biggest thing that I learned is that there is nothing to learn — because we are the same.” It is on the basis of this felt solidarity that Amazônia makes its case for the need to protect and celebrate the lives of the Amazon and its people.

Creative constraints

Sebastião is known for photographing exclusively in black-and-white. Asked during his tour on whether he has considered further iterations of Amazônia — for example, in the direction of colour photography — he replied, simply, “Not for me. Other photographers — they do colour.” Elsewhere, he has commented at greater length on his preference for monochrome. Colour, he suggests, distracts; black-and-white clarifies his subjects, focusing attention on what is most important for the image he wants to make.

In Amazônia, the artist’s austere palette — a curiously classical one for a deeply contemporary problem — provokes deeper reflection yet. For herein lies a surprising resonance between theme and technique, style and subject.

The rainforest is, after all, precious because finite. Hence the need to view it in terms appropriate to both its wonder and fragility. Appropriately, Sebastiao’s black-and-white photographs not only represent the Amazon but do so with something truly rare in our avaricious age: a magisterial embrace of constraint and creative limits. Through their singular aesthetic, which does more with less, Sebastiao’s photographs not only evoke what the material and ecological conditions of their subjects are, but show us how to pay attention to those subjects. These images crystallise, in style and in spirit, what is increasingly at stake in the world today: beauty and truth, many-shaded vicissitudes of face and place, nothing more (but nothing less) than the life of light and shadow.

A timely reminder

Today, fear more than hope colours global discourse on conservation. The prevalence of “greenwashing” — tokenistic measures that merely cover up institutional failures to address environmental issues — breeds cynicism and disillusionment. We are simultaneously on red alert for what UN Secretary General António Gueterres has called “climate emergency” and, more recently, “a moment of truth” for climate action. Work like the Salgados’ arguably reminds us of the importance of reviewing our place in the world, and our moral priorities within it, in black-and-white.

These concerns are no less pressing closer to home. Singapore has lost more than 90% of its native forest to colonisation and industrialisation. Debates on how to balance human interests with the ecological costs of urban development rage on. Coming hot on the heels of myriad recent events like the Singapore Nature Film Festival, the 40th Singapore Bird Race, and the nature-themed Singapore Writer’s Festival, Amazônia is a timely addition to the mix. Viewers familiar with Singapore’s contemporary artistic work on environmental issues — for example, the multimedia creations of Marvin Tang, Robert Zhao, and the Migrant Ecologies Project — will appreciate the provocatively different take on art and ecology offered here. 

Whether you’re a connoisseur of photography or a lover of our fragile planet, Amazônia lends itself to a diverse range of encounters, engagements, and interventions — much like the rainforest it so compellingly celebrates. 

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Amazônia runs until 2 March 2025 at the National Museum of Singapore. The exhibition is accompanied by public programmes, including a photography masterclass by local photographer and printmaker Chris Yap (18 January) and a tasting session inspired by Amazônian food heritage (25 January). Visit nhb.gov.sg to find out more.

(Amazônia features images containing nudity and dead animals; visitor discretion is advised.)

Header image: Sebãstio Salgado, YAWANAWÁ. Image courtesy of the National Museum of Singapore.

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