1. 3rd
ESO European Sections CIL 2015 Salgado exhibition:Activity 1
On Friday, we shall visit Sebastiao Salgado Genesis photograph exhibition at Caixa Forum. Genesis
has been displayed in different countries all over the world.
the Daily Telegraph, a British newspaper published an
interview with the artist when Salgado's project was
exhibited in London.
Before reading the interview do the following exercises.
1. Get into groups and read the nine quotes on the left column, which are taken from Salgado's
answers. Match them with the (a)-(b) summaries.
2. Imagine you were the journalist. Which quote would you choose as headline for the
newspaper article.
3. What were the questions the journalist asked the photographers
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/photography/9945900/Sebastiao-Salgado-A-Gods-eye-view-of-
the-planet-interview.html
1.“The first time I looked through it I knew I had found
a new way to relate to things,”
a) Things photographers need to do but other artists
don't
2.“It was so fantastic to be able to freeze a moment and
then to have it in my hands. From that moment
photography became my life.”
b) The addressee of Genesis
3.“Photography is not objective it is deeply subjective –
my photography is consistent ideologically and
ethically with the person I am.”
c) The uniqueness of photography
4.“One photograph takes one 250th of a second to take,
so if I have an exhibition that has 250 pictures, that is
just one second! I have just one second to tell a story.”
d) How he discovered his vocation
5.“You can sit in your house and be a great writer, but
with photography the story is outside the door. You
have to go and you have to go far.”
e) Photography in his life
6. “When I started Genesis I was 59 and I thought I was
an old man, but now I am going to be 70 and I feel fine
so I am ready to start again. Life is a bicycle: you must
keep going forward and you pedal until you drop.”
f) His technique as a photographer
7.“Genesis is love letter to the Earth and to the
resilience of nature”
g) His approach to Genesis project
8. “I did not do Genesis as a journalist or an
anthropologist or as a biologist,”
h) The meaning of this exhibition
9. “I photograph like I always did by taking
photographs and then printing out contact sheets. Some
photographers take thousands of pictures and delete
most of them – I delete nothing. It is important that I
stay inside the pattern that I have always followed.”
i) What a camera means to him