Artist: Sebastião Salgado

“When I take a photograph, I engage my entire cultural, human and social heritage. It is my life, my personality, my way of seeing the world that stands before what I am photographing. With all this and my sense of perception, I can compose an image. A photograph is taken in a fraction of a second, but you need a whole life in order to create it.” - Sebastião Salgado

Flowers Gallery presents a solo exhibition by Sebastião Salgado, featuring selected works from his new series of platinum-palladium prints. The photographs in Magnum Opus are representative of some of Salgado’s major works, representing almost five decades of photographic expeditions around the world.

The selection of images, made by Sebastião Salgado and Lélia Wanick Salgado, include works from his two most recent series, Amazônia and Genesis, both of which reflect Salgado’s sustained investigation of some of the most remote areas of the planet, and concern for the preservation of the natural world. These are shown alongside earlier works from the acclaimed Other Americas series, chronicling his journeys through rural Latin America; Sahel, which captured the devastating effects of famines in Africa; and the photograph Gold Mine of Serra Pelada, Brazil (1986) from Workers, a global six-year project documenting the exploitative realities of manual labour and structural poverty in an industrial age. Also present is the well-known image Greater Burhan Oil Field, capturing the burning oil fields of Kuwait in 1991.

This important selection of Sebastião Salgado’s work has been printed using platinum-palladium, a sophisticated archival method of printing with an expansive tonal range and characteristically luminous quality. This is the first time that platinum-palladium works from Magnum Opus will be on view in the UK.