Exhibitions
Water claims its place in the gaze of Sebastião Salgado
Aqua Mater brings together at the Fundación Canal nearly one hundred large-format photographs that explore the vastness of natural landscapes and the fragility of the planet through one of the essential elements for life.
There are elements that, because of their constant presence, seem to be part of an everyday landscape, until a gaze is able to restore their entire essential dimension. Water is one of them. Source of life, transformative force, and witness to the planet’s changes, it becomes the guiding thread of Aqua Mater, Sebastião Salgado’s exhibition project that comes to Madrid with a wide selection of his photographic work dedicated to this fundamental resource.
The exhibition, organized by La Fábrica in collaboration with Fundación Canal and curated by Lélia Wanick Salgado, presents nearly one hundred large-format black and white photographs. A proposal that brings together for the first time in a single exhibition a broad selection of the Aqua Mater and Glaciers series, establishing a visual dialogue between different geographies and manifestations of water. The exhibition is on display at Sala Castellana 214 of Fundación Canal, coinciding with the commemoration of the 175th anniversary of Canal de Isabel II and the 25th anniversary of the Foundation.
For over two decades, Salgado traveled some of the most remote and spectacular territories on the planet to capture the magnitude of an element that often escapes human perception. Antarctica, Patagonia, Amazonia, Iceland, the Himalayas, or Canada make up this photographic itinerary, in which the landscapes acquire an almost monumental dimension. Rather than documenting natural settings, the artist’s goal is to build a visual experience in which nature regains prominence and human beings are placed before the immensity of a world they cannot control.
Icebergs are fragments of glaciers that break off and enter the sea. Between Blanco and Bellingshausen islands, South Sandwich Islands, 2009. © Sebastião Salgado.
Black and white, one of the most recognizable features of Salgado’s photographic language, intensifies this reading. The renunciation of color does not represent a loss of information, but rather a way to concentrate attention on the textures, volumes, contrasts, and structures of the territory. Light models the surfaces, while the forms of water, ice, and earth build compositions of great plastic power. In these images, documentary photography transcends the recording of reality to approach an aesthetic experience that oscillates between contemplation and vertigo.
The bringing together of Aqua Mater and Glaciers further expands the understanding of the project. Water appears in its multiple expressions: as oceanic immensity, as a river course crossing territories, or as a body of ice that conserves the planet’s climatic memory. This diversity allows us to understand the landscape not as a static reality but as a living system subject to permanent transformations. The beauty of the photographs thus coexists with an awareness of the vulnerability of ecosystems and the need to preserve them.
Behind the project is also the gaze of Lélia Wanick Salgado, Brazilian author, film producer, and environmentalist, who has developed a career closely linked to environmental defense and the construction of the visual discourse of Sebastião Salgado’s work. Lélia directs Amazonas Images, the news agency she founded with the photographer in 2004, and has been a decisive figure in the conception and articulation of various exhibition projects.
You may be
interested
...
