Spend six years in the Amazon with Sebastião Salgado, five decades with Helmut Newton, long months on the road in America, and a year in Covid world
In colonial times, Brazil’s European settlers referred to the malarial, snake-infested jungle of the Amazon as a “green hell”. Sebastião Salgado’s superb Amazônia (Taschen) sees it as a black and white heaven, or as a paradise in the process of being lost – not closed to unworthy human beings but whittled away by farmers and churned up by mining. Salgado mythologises the landscapes he photographs, and his documentation of six years in the Amazon looks like a reprise of the first week in Genesis. As drenching rainstorms retreat from the steaming, apparently molten earth, dry land solidifies; tribal people clamber out of the river and begin to increase and multiply; the creator’s covenant with his biodiverse creation is renewed by a rainbow that arches over the mountains.
Salgado depicts the indigenous Amazonians as noble savages, innocent but startlingly elegant with their feathered headdresses and patterned face paint. Ejected from Eden, their latter-day descendants perform eroticised war dances in Helmut Newton’s Legacy (Taschen). Newton, who enjoyed reducing his sophisticated female subjects to a primitive state, saw clothes as fetish wear that revealed the body rather than covering it. Models were stripped nude after the catwalk parade ended, then ordered to reassume their strutting poses: is their bare skin also a disguise? Jerry Hall squeezes a slab of bleeding beef against her face, and another model shows off the Bvlgari jewels on her wrists and fingers while chopping up an uncooked chicken. In Newton’s perverse tableaux, beauty is an act of violence, an armed assault on nature.
