It may be best to start recalling the origin of this word.
In Greek, "photo" meaning light.
And "graphein" was writing, drawing.
A photographer is literally someone drawing with light.
Someone who writes and rewrites the world with light and shadow.
Sierra Pelada, la pray Mine Brazil,
in front of me.
When I reached the edge of that huge hole
I raised the hair.
I had never seen anything like it.
There, I saw before me in a split second,
the history of mankind.
The history of the construction of the pyramids,
the Tower of Babel,
King Solomon's Mines.
The sound of a single machine in there was no sound.
Only you could hear
the murmur of 50,000 people in a big hole.
Conversations, noise, human noise
mixed with touches manuals ...
Actually, I have traveled to the beginning of time there.
I could almost hear the murmur of gold in those souls.
We had to throw all that land.
Not everything is gold,
They had to climb, get out, climb the small stairs
then get to the big stairs,
and come to the surface.
You're not thinking of falling.
And if you fall, there is a risk you take several.
I up several times a day
and it never occurred to me that I might fall
because no one fell.
We were there to carry bags or to take pictures, in my case.
The men went up there 50 or 60 times a day.
The only way down an inclined plane like that
He is running.
Si paras, te caes.
All these people together formed a very organized world.
But completely crazy.
They may look like slaves,
but there was not a single slave.
If there was slavery there, it was the desire to be rich.
Everyone wanted to be rich.
There you could find everything: intellectuals, lawyers,
Farm employees,
City workers ...
They all came to look for an opportunity.
Because when we gave a gold mine,
everyone working in that part of the mine
They had the right to choose a bag.
And in those sacks they had chosen
slavery was hiding.
It could be nothing or could be a kilo of gold.
At that time they played their independence.
All men, when they begin to touch the gold,
They do not return.
I saw this picture for the first time in a gallery,
more than twenty years ago.
I did not know who had taken.
I thought, "He must be a great photographer and an adventurer."
Behind it was a stamp and a signature.
Sebastiao Salgado.
I bought a copy.
The gallery drawer pulled more photos of the same photographer.
What I saw moved me deeply,
especially this image,
portrait of a blind woman Tuareg.
Even though tears cause I see every day,
So since then, it hangs on my desk.
I knew something of Sebastiao Salgado.
Really they cared about people.
This meant a lot to me.
At the end of the day, people are the salt of the earth.
It was a long time before we met
and we talked about his life, his work and where it came from everything.
The salt of the earth
We can put many photographers in one place,
always will draw very different pictures
because necessarily come
very very different sites.
Everyone has their way of seeing,
each according to his story.
I think my story
It is that I learned my way to see here in this place.
Here I have an ideal world.
Took long walks with my father,
through this place, and we came here to watch.
Behind each of these mountains,
there is a story, there is something to see.
Here I dreamed a lot.
He wanted to go beyond these mountains, he wanted to know.
A JOURNEY WITH Sebastiao Salgado
MOUNTAINS OF WEST PAPUA, INDONESIA, Village Yali, 2011
Sebastiao was very bohemian, was always traveling.
He liked to travel as anyone.
My father was like that.
It was not anywhere. It was like a shuttle.
That was Tiao.
I thought I was in Vitoria, and was here.
O he was in the north, or making political propaganda.
And as for studies,
if I had not had friends, he would have studied.
Sebastiao was left for studies. He gave a lot of work.
But he studied economics.
I wanted to do law.
He studied one year, but did not like
and he switched to economics, and did well.
This was Sebastiao Salgado,
Father.
He bequeathed his name to his only son,
who, though he remained all his life a restless traveler,
He benefited from studies that his father forced him to take
in ways that would never have imagined.
His studies in Economics endowed him sound knowledge
markets, trade and industry.
So I knew what ruled the world.
For him, all started in Aimorés, a small town in Brazil.
There the estate of his father stood under the big sky.
There were vast Atlantic forests.
The river then was still navigable.
But above all, endless trains were passing by
bursting with minerals, iron ore
going from there to the rest of the world.
At the end of the day, this was and still is the largest mining area in the world.
That's where Sebastiao grew. He was the only child among seven sisters.
What a life!
Every summer,
He played on the banks of the Rio Doce, the "sweet river".
That's where we are.
So here we are,
our small crew.
Sebastian, ?te ahí falls?
I learned one thing.
Having a photographer in front of my camera
It is very different from shooting anyone else.
Not standing still doing himself.
No. For professional bias, react and respond
using his weapon, his camera.
Returns the shot.
- Wim, I have a very nice picture of you. - I will not say it.
I can imagine!
In this case, it was not just me ... fotografiándome
Look at the picture.
Two of us had on target.
The other, my fellow director, was his eldest son, Julian.
He had already accompanied his father with his camera on several trips,
as Papua New Guinea, who have already seen.
Or here, to a remote island north of the East Siberian Sea.
I wish I could join them.
Father and son Salgado invited me to continue this documentary with them,
I guess to add an external view of your adventure.
I did not hesitate for a second.
What more could you ask for?
At last I could get to know this man,
discover what motivated him
and why his work had impressed me so much.
I did not know I was going to discover
much more than a photographer.
Sebastiao was 15
when he took the train and went to the small town forever
to attend school in the provincial capital of Vitoria.
So young, at first did not know what to do with money in their pockets.
I had never paid any money.
On the farm, which produced all of them.
So, at first, starved,
dreading going to a store to order something to eat.
Ignorant of what had become of Sebastiao
He had not appeared this girl in your life.
Lelia.
I was 17, I was studying music and incredibly beautiful.
It was love at first sight.
When Sebastiao won a scholarship
to study for a Master in Economics from the University of Sao Paulo
they moved there and married.
It was the 60,
both they involved in left-wing movements,
as other students in Paris, Berlin or Chicago.
Brazil was under the rule of a brutal military dictatorship,
thus, the risk of being arrested, deported and tortured was constant.
In August 1969,
Sebastian y su Lelia if marcharon of homeland
and they took a boat to France.
Sebastiao while continuing his training as an economist,
Lélia studying architecture.
A memorable day, she bought a camera for their work.
And we really had fun with her was Sebastiao.
The first photograph was taken Lélia, of course.
Sebastiao entered the International Coffee Organization
and they moved to London.
With the idea of ??a career in the World Bank,
often he traveled to Africa to study development projects.
Lélia's camera was taking
and always he returned with many pictures.
Realizing that those pictures
They met him much more than economic reports,
both took a bold decision.
He had to take the enormous risk
to abandon his promising career as an economist
to start from scratch.
They returned to Paris and spent all photographic equipment cost.
For a time, Sebastiao tried photographing sports,
made portraits, weddings and even naked,
before finding his calling.
Those are my first photos.
We were in Tahoua.
Two young mothers queuing
to receive food.
It was a time of great drought in Niger, 1973.
For Lelia was more difficult because she was pregnant.
I remember once we were there,
in a friend's house in Niamey.
Then came the marabout of Niamey.
Lélia was wearing shorts, she was gorgeous.
And the marabout came, sat down,
and said Lelia.
"Come out, sit on my lap."
"Oh," I said,
"Marabout sir, there is a small problem,
this woman is pregnant
our first child.
You better stay here. "
He understood the need ...
the lack of synchronization at that time.
And finally, we talked so much that it was a kilo of sugar,
as happy as if he had gone with Lelia.
His son Julian was born in Paris in 1974.
There's my future colleague and co-director.
Lélia continued to support Sebastiao around as a young mother.
He worked hard in their studies
and to present the work of Sebastiao everywhere.
In magazines, newspapers and agencies.
And so,
after some relevant publications,
both they found the courage to conceive her first major photographic project.
"Other Americas".
It would take Sebastiao throughout South America.
The small Juliano got used
the long absences of her father.
OTHER AMERICAS
After leaving Brazil in 1969,
I started to really miss Latin America.
And I decided to make a trip
to neighboring Brazil.
Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia ...
Also it sounded to see mountains of Latin America.
The Andes.
At that time, Latin America, there was a profound social upheaval.
Theology of Liberation.
On that trip I met a young priest in Ecuador,
Gabicho named.
We fear the same age, a young photographer and a young priest.
He was the one who carried the word of God,
farmers organized into cooperatives, introducing solidarity.
And when he had all these communities to reach,
I could make impressive trips.
Here we were more than 3,000 meters.
Sometimes we climbed slopes of 600 to 700 meters per day.
But I greatly enjoyed living in this landscape,
in those communities.
These are the Saraguros, a group of Indians in southern Ecuador.
Very religious, but also heavy drinkers of alcohol.
More than half of the community, on weekends, men and women
They are completely drunk.
The farmer left
It called Lupe, Guadalupe.
Lupe was my friend.
At that time, I had very long hair,
blonde and very long.
And he had a big beard, redhead and blonde.
One day we were walking through the mountains,
He approached me and told me. "Look, Sebastiao,
I know that you have sent from heaven. "
Because according to legend Saraguros
the gods, to the image of Christ,
They return to Earth to see them, to observe
and see who deserved heaven.
While touring the mountains, he took the opportunity to tell his life.
He firmly believed that I was there to observe them.
And up there counting their behavior.
I had never seen before, an entire people
another rhythm of time.
The time I spent with Saraguros seemed a hundred years.
Everything was so slow.
It was another way of thinking, another speed.
There were fatalism in their faces.
This is in the state of Oaxaca in Mexico,
is a group of peasants called mixes.
There, everything is medieval, the plow, all ...
It was the profound Latin America.
He was a peasant village,
but more important was the music that community.
It was a people who loved music.
All members of the community who could play an instrument
They did not need to work.
They worked as musicians.
They let me sleep a few days
in a cement room, very cold,
to see if reluctant, if you really wanted to stay.
As I managed to resist,
I was taken from there and took me to a house.
I went more to the community.
And for me it was a pleasure.
We became friends and coexisted in harmony in the community.
This is in northern Mexico, are the Tarahumara.
They are great runners are runners.
They walk away.
My God, it was hell follow these aborigines
they were not walking, flying!
This is a Tarahumara,
with his face well marked, well lived.
With her beautiful hair, great hair.
Several times they came to my camera
and they made me feel a sound technician.
They told me things like I was recording them.
The strength of a portrait is that in that split second
We understand a little the life of the person photographed.
The eyes speak volumes, the expression of the face.
When you do a portrait, is not you alone who takes the picture.
The person offers photo.
Those trips were very important to me.
To return after years without stepping on my country, to be here.
The essence was the same, it was my continent, we were very close.
"Other Americas" led him to Sebastiao eight years.
On this trip to South America deeper
he simply disappeared for long periods.
Julian grew up with a father who was almost always absent.
His parents could at least correspond.
Clearly this occurred before the current media.
Each time he returned home to see his family
and edit your photos with Lelia.
Sebastiao seemed like a great adventurer to his son.
A superhero, rather than a photographer.
i And cut!
I am, thirty years later.
Finally, I joined my father in one of his missions.
A Wrangel,
a desert island in the Arctic Ocean.
Sebastiao hoped to photograph
the last great gathering of walruses.
I wanted to find out who the man was,
the man he had only known as father.
I wanted to find the photographer, adventurer, for the first time.
Cursed Bear!
We had the bear.
Incredible! It has made everyone from getting into the water.
What are you thinking?
What are you thinking, Father?
I'm thinking, you know, doing this will be difficult.
I do not know if it's okay.
It is different when the bear is close, we can take a picture with him closely.
But with a scenario that is not good.
We have a document of the bear, but we do not have a photo.
This is not right.
There's nothing behind.
Nothing to frame the photo, to beautify the landscape.
Not have stock, we have nothing.
Awesome!
The image I had in the end, are the teeth out,
They could not discern the shapes of heads, stunning.
Like we were in Dante's Inferno,
with all those teeth,
all these forms ... Incredible!
Father, talk to me a little of your 1979?
In 79, Lélia was pregnant, expecting her second child.
It would be child already knew.
And when Rodrigo was born,
everything was going to be Down syndrome.
It was nice, torn eyes,
and I had the impression that it was completely normal.
And also Lélia.
The doctor did many tests. Three weeks await your response.
The day I called the doctor
I felt such a strong tension,
when I saw the answer, I cried.
He could not stop mourn.
My little brother would never be able to go to school,
or read and write like me.
Rodrigo would be isolated in a world that we were never going to be able to share.
It was very difficult for my parents.
But then something happened.
Thanks to love, Rodrigo created his own language.
Slowly,
as a family, we learned to decipher their emotional alphabet
and communicate without words.
Poce later, my mother, my brother and I took a plane to Brazil.
The military dictatorship had fallen.
Topic five years and did not understand how important this trip was going to be.
At one point, a man climbed one of the blinds
and sunlight flooded the interior of the aircraft.
A voice echoed in the cabin:
"We are flying over Brazil."
My mother looked out the window and said nothing.
He was seeing his homeland for the first time after many years.
It was a moment of happiness, and yet, when I looked,
I was crying.
My father was in French Guiana and would come later.
December 31, returning to Brazil.
It was great to get to your country,
After 10 years, half out.
It was shocking. Lelia had left the Vitoria was not found.
Vitória urbanism had changed. Everything had changed.
My region had changed.
I met again with my parents. The I left young and strong.
On returning I found an old man. My father was very old.
But, at that time,
I wanted to see Brazil further.
My sister gave me a car
and I traveled for six months in the northeast of Brazil.
He did not know the northeast.
He had always dreamed of northeastern Brazil.
I met these people on a funeral.
I parked on the side of the road and went with them.
Infant mortality was very high in the northeast of Brazil.
These are children who died before baptism.
It is believed that unbaptized children
They have no right to go to heaven.
They stay in a region between both worlds, called limbo.
Children buried with his eyes closed, they were baptized.
If his eyes were open ...
and they buried him to find his way.
Otherwise, it was wandering for eternity.
At that time, the coffins were rented in the church.
Rent the coffin was cheaper.
The same coffin was used dozens of times.
This is perfectly seen the coffins to rent ...
and these are shoes.
He sold everything: shoes, coffins, bananas, vegetables,
ice cream, all ...
It is an area of ??the world where life and death are very close.
Here is a prayer group
exerting political work at the same time.
In Brazil, we had and still have
a great movement of landless peasants.
Many of them, the majority come from here.
Proviene del northeast of Brazil.
They are people
a great moral force,
great physical strength,
despite being very fragile because they eat poorly.
Look at the dryness of the area. It is very dry.
Why so, we have a piece of Sahel here in Brazil.
And here in the street,
people leave for good.
Sometimes the land is so dry, so hard,
people migrate to cities in the south.
They give up, leave the land.
FARM SALGALO
MINAS GERAIS, BRAZIL
We have spent many years suffering a shortage of rain.
Here we had many cattle.
Now we have nothing, it's over.
The drought was great.
He finished with pastures, ended income.
How it ended, Grandpa? Why it's over?
It ended because of the drought.
He stood around, but no one saw or a grass grow.
Now we just have time.
Between your father and I,
20,000 invested in that.
Where you are?
Here he abounded all.
There were many birds many sparrows.
Canarios, tico-ticos,
zorzales ...
There on the hill, there was a good kill.
And in that summit also he had a very good head.
There is much erosion.
Now, for example, the land is bonded.
If rains come, there no grass, nothing,
to hold, cause a disaster.
I have no idea ...
to know how to stop erosion.
He grandfather, he was in the hacienda happy?
What?
If I was in this hacienda happy?
?Si was happy?
I was happy to have my children.
I raised all, seven women,
with six career as Tiao.
I raised my children here with difficulty.
I was happy.
Only wood I took over a hundred contos
to take my children to school.
All were raised with good nutrition
with good clothes.
Since I arrived in Brazil, the land of my grandfather have been.
Burned and dry.
When Sebastiao returned to the farm after traveling the northeast of Brazil,
the place had nothing to do with paradise he remembered as a child.
But he worried about something else.
The suffering he saw, changed.
His role as a photographer took on new meaning.
We understood how important it was for him to leave.
She missed him terribly, but I understood.
Sahel, THE END OF THE ROAD 1984-1986
For his next project, which would lead to Sahel in Africa,
Sebastiao began working with MSF.
I worked in Ethiopia in 1984.
And then I continued throughout the Sahel, 85 and 86.
Finally, spend nearly two years in a row in this region
doing a story about hunger.
There was a refugee camp,
the largest in the history of mankind so far.
I had a wild desire to show that.
To show that there was a large part of humanity
He is living in poverty.
Which it was mostly a problem of deals
not just a question of natural disasters.
It was a Coptic region
They are Christians in northern Ethiopia,
of tremendous humility.
They are unable, even with a child about to die,
to take the lead of others.
They prefer to wait.
Look at the state are.
In that state, one does not stand long.
In those fields hunger killed many lives.
Causes physical discomfort,
but other diseases that they kill.
If we take the anger, we become dehydrated quickly.
We can lose up to 12 liters of fluid a day due to diarrhea
and die in two or three days.
So young faces
and so aged by suffering.
If you look at the front, it is not elderly,
it has aged are the eyes, which are empty.
Look how young he is. Look at your baby.
He was her husband.
During the night because of the cold, many deaths they occur.
Dying here is like a continuation of life.
People get used to die.
A husband to his wife washed before burial.
With mountain clothes, dressed in goatskins.
A pretty young woman.
According to Coptic beliefs,
the body must be clean for the encounter with God.
It should be washed, wash it all
although water is scarce.
Every person killed is a piece of the world that dies.
A father prepares his son for burial,
to say the last goodbye.
Usually it is the family that prepares its dead.
And know that the government
retains food, not allowed to reach the population
as happened there,
in that field in northern Ethiopia ...
It was a brutal political dishonesty.
Ethiopia Tigray Region, 1984
I returned to Ethiopia in late 1984.
By then, the guerrillas realized that the government was plundering the region.
They began to send people to Sudan.
They went through the region of Tigray.
There was an attack by two helicopters.
They were Mi-24 combat helicopters very fast.
They shot people with machine guns.
I took a picture and ran.
Many pregnant women walked
hoping to be able to eat and drink water
to reach the promised land.
I had to go there
at least two more months.
And when I arrived in Sudan,
I had a lot of work with the arrival of these people.
This man came from Ethiopia.
His son was exhausted, perhaps dead,
but the man was carrying.
When he got to the doctors the child was dead,
after so much walking.
We had to decamp from MSF.
Water is essential in these camps
and it was becoming a big problem.
You had to move as quickly as possible.
They piled into the trucks of the United Nations
to take them to another camp,
a beautiful and fertile land
on the banks of the Blue Nile.
I did about 300, 400 kilometers aboard these trucks.
Two of my friends truck,
They acted as if it were a Sunday afternoon either,
and they were telling stories under a tree.
Being close to the Nile, we had water.
But here people died
because there was no food.
They reached the edge of poverty.
They forgot or could not bring food.
There was a disorganization of food.
They said there was, that there was.
And when I got here there was nothing.
Me fui a Mali.
Here too there was a great drought.
The skin of the people were like the bark of trees.
Trees marked by wind and sand,
by sandstorms.
There were only women and children.
The men went to Libya to work,
or they migrated to Ivory Coast in search of work
with the promise to return and bring food for the family.
But very few returned.
All were safe
because MSF did a great job.
They brought aid to the region.
This is a friend, Luc, a Belgian doctor.
It is measuring and weighing the child.
After 15, 20 days, they were unrecognizable, healthier.
But they were scarred for life
because they lacked things during growth.
This kid was alone,
with his little guitar in hand,
He is carrying the remains of a shirt,
but not wearing pants.
Watch her determination, her posture.
He is someone who knows where it goes.
Looking for other groups of people,
with your dog ...
A boy of eight, nine years.
Sebastian is encarinó
with the people of the Sahel region.
Again and again.
Photos, the book and the exhibition of Lélia
They called the world's attention on droughts,
and the fate of millions of lives.
And unanswered questions about the cause of that situation.
Then Sebastiao turned to a topic that he spent another six years
and countless trips to almost thirty countries.
WORKERS
The third volume of photographs conceived with Lélia.
I wanted to pay a kind of homage
all men and women who built our world.
The archeology of the industrial era.
Sebastian y Lelia investigaron
and planned "Workers" meticulously.
Then he again traveled to the four corners of the world.
He photographed steelworkers in the Soviet Union,
he lived with saboteurs ships in Bangladesh,
sailed with fishermen in Galicia and Sicily,
He showed the mechanical production of cars in Kolkata.
He watched farmers in Rwanda,
country had already visited, but as an economist.
Now the mission was another.
His perspective had changed, but he was the same.
Driven by the same empathy for the human condition.
With each episode of "workers"
Sebastiao was completely submerged
in the field of manual labor.
As the weeks passed with miners in the gold mines of Serra Pelada.
In 1991, at the end of the first Gulf War,
Iraqi troops withdrew
and Saddam Hussein set fire to thousands of oil wells.
Thousands of firefighters from around the world descended on those oil fields.
Sebastiao had to go too,
driven by curiosity of this explosive profession.
When I saw the first images on TV,
I knew I had to do that report.
It was like working in a big theater.
Some 500 wells on fire.
A scene set in huge, the size of a planet.
No controlled us, we could go where we wanted.
There were fumes, thick smoke, oil.
All that accumulated smoke was so dense that the sun did not pass.
Sometimes it was dark 24 hours.
After putting out the fire
the ground was so hot,
I had to throw a lot of water for cooling,
if not, the temperature was so high that oil burn again.
Still, sometimes,
There was an explosion that sounded like a cannon.
The noise was deafening.
It was like working near the engine of a plane.
Today I'm a little deaf.
My deafness began then.
These are Canadians,
The Calgary Fire Department.
They brought a nice red truck.
And they had a rule: after putting out the fire,
I had to wash the truck every night.
The next morning, returned to be covered in oil.
A hell of a job!
I delayed my departure at least two or three times.
Until the day I had to leave.
It broke my heart
having to leave such a huge show.
I turned around,
until near the end,
when we passed a big wall.
That day was a reporter for the New York Times.
It was no longer anyone's territory. The war had destroyed everything.
We broke the door.
Upon entering,
a species discovered
Paradise
become a hell.
It was a kind of Garden of the royal family of Kuwait.
There were horses, thoroughbreds,
they had gone completely mad.
The animals are the first to escape before a catastrophe,
if they are free to escape.
But there they were not.
Birds found there, it was an oasis.
Everything was well irrigated.
Birds that could not fly because they were glued feathers.
Kuwaitis left to reach the disaster
leaving the confined animals,
together with the Bedouins, who are not considered human beings.
"Workers" managed to unite the Sebastiao Salgado economist
with the artist in which he had become.
These photographs have been published in the best journals,
the exhibition toured the world,
and the book was published in many languages.
Pero Sebastian y Lelia in pararon.
They immediately began work on a new phase of his photography.
They noted that another burning issue of our times
It was the displacement of entire populations
due to wars, famines and the role of the global market.
As Europe closed its borders,
Sebastiao trying to shed light on the lives of the marginalized.
Again with Lelia, he began researching and planning.
She was again the momentum of this new chapter
which they called "Exodus".
EXODUS
It sparked global concern about the lives of these refugees
de India, Vietnam, Filipinas,
South America, Palestine, Iraq
and many other places.
But Sebastiao returned again and again to the continent
I had captivated his imagination for some time already.
A África.
I was doing my project on population movements
in 1994, when the Rwandan president's plane
He was killed.
It all started with a great movement of population to Tanzania
due to the brutal repression against the Tutsis in Rwanda.
And I was one of the first to arrive.
It was a catastrophe.
People who fled to Burundi,
al Congo, a Uganda...
They fled to everywhere.
The streets were full of people.
People resting on the side of the road,
he carried all their belongings on bicycles ...
People who fled with what they could.
We follow the path in the opposite direction.
We went to the border.
There was no security, no nothing.
I came to Rwanda and that was frightening.
The death toll I met on these roads.
It had broken Granada.
Those who were not killed by the Granada were killed with machetes.
I understood the magnitude
the catastrophe he was seeing.
Genocide was committed in that country.
Were about 150 kilometers to the outskirts of Kigali,
and 150 kilometers of dead.
I returned because my story was about you people.
He was writing a book on refugees, on the exodus.
I went into these camps
and I began to see
the number of people who left Rwanda.
Hell settled in this paradise.
It was frightening
see how in such a beautiful savanna
He had formed a megacity.
Within days, there were almost a million people there.
Amid all this anguish, something touched me very much.
It was seeing this mother with her little,
and little confidence in her mother.
Violence
and brutality
they are not a monopoly
of distant countries.
It is here, in Europe, in the former Yugoslavia.
It's very shocking.
On a bus coming from Krajina, Croatia across ...
One person was killed through that hole.
Croats killed many people to leave Krajina.
Violence is widespread.
What I dislike most
It is to see how much hatred is contagious.
These people have seen violence.
Entire families.
All Krajina Serb population was expelled.
From time to time they were driven from their homes
looking for a place where to go.
They had their neighbors in front and shooting at them.
This is a refugee camp near Tuzla,
en la Bosnia central.
They are families fleeing the enclave of Zepa,
where Serbs killed thousands of young people.
We were there at the right time. Just as families arrived
in a state of high anxiety.
There were only women, elderly
and children.
The young men had been detained or killed.
It is rare that this happens in Europe,
the late twentieth century.
But here, the cars,
we can see that those people with a standard of living
a European standard of living,
with a European intellectual level.
A European infrastructure.
And who lost everything.
Hundreds of kilometers filled with people and cars.
We are a very fierce animal.
We are a terrible animal, we humans.
It is here in Europe, whether in Africa, Latin America, wherever.
Our violence is extreme.
Our history is a history of wars.
It is a story without end,
a history of repression,
crazy story.
The situation in Rwanda continued to evolve.
The Hutu army, which had the power, was defeated.
And he retired to the Congo and the region of Goma.
First, the Tutsis had fled the barbarity of the Hutus.
Then they were Hutus
those fleeing Tutsi occupation.
So they all fled.
In several days,
in the month of July 1994
Goma region
He welcomed more than two million people.
And there catastrophe was installed,
diseases such as cholera began to spread
and people started dropping like flies.
There were at least 12,000 or 15,000 deaths a day.
I took pictures of piles of dead like this.
I saw that father approached with his child,
and throw it there.
He was chatting with fellow like that.
We did not give supply to bury people.
Machine brought a French army
and caught galore, dozens,
They threw them on the ground
and covered with soil.
Everyone should see these images,
to see how terrible it is our species.
These orphans, I found them on the road ...
Of these three children
the two with the most lively eyes will survive.
The eyes of the morbid, he was dying.
When I left there, I was sick.
Very sick. My body was sick.
It was not an infectious disease,
my soul was sick.
I went to Rwanda a year after the disaster
for the return of Hutus, who were in the Congo
and they had nowhere to go.
The United Nations began to force them to return.
We felt that the whole planet was covered in refugee tents.
After working there,
Tutsi authorities proposed visit me
several places, scenes of repression.
People took refuge in a church thinking that could be saved.
All were killed.
This was at a school,
You can still see the blackboard with written when passing through.
it was scary.
Of people who left Rwanda, some two million people,
some returned to Rwanda,
but the other feared a possible crackdown.
A group of 250,000 people left the city of Goma
and he went into the Congo forest.
We lost.
Everyone knew they were lost 250,000 people.
We did not know where they were.
Six months later,
They began to appear Kisangani in central Congo.
They were in the forest for six months.
And here, the UN High Commissioner was taking me right there.
There was a train and rode me.
The train, after leaving the food, he should return.
I spent three days with these people kept coming.
Groups and groups of people coming.
But when you think about 250,000 people left,
and 40,000 returnees ...
210,000 people were missing.
And in parallel, life continued.
Men who cut hair.
And this Congolese here,
with his calculator
dollars trying to collect people,
currencies, and it was there trying to change them.
In the middle of nowhere! Amid a forest isolated from everything.
At one point,
that the guerrillas Kisangani, which was protutsi,
and he began to cast these people.
To send them back.
They had to walk another six months to return to Rwanda.
They began to kill some.
There, I met people who could not more.
They had begun to rave,
They had lost his mind.
They had gone mad.
In fact, this people who were expelled,
We have not heard anything.
I'm sure they were all killed.
This was my last trip, this sad adventure in Rwanda.
I went there.
He does not believe in anything. He did not believe in the salvation of the human race.
We could not survive that.
We did not deserve to live anymore.
No one deserved to live.
How many times I threw the camera down to mourn for what he saw?
Sebastiao had peered into the heart of darkness
and he questioned his work as a social photographer
and witness to the human condition.
What remained to be done after Rwanda?
At that time, my grandfather's health worsened.
My parents had to return to Brazil to take over the farm.
It was just barren land. They did not know what to do with that.
Birds, alligators and forests had disappeared.
There was no childhood memories of Sebastiao.
Then Lélia had a surprising idea.
Why we not replant the forest that was here before?
The forest that was here before and that covered these hills
It was the Atlantic Forest.
The Atlantic forest.
No one had tried to replant.
Let alone over 600 hectares.
The suggestion came from his desire Lélia
to maintain the spirit of the family.
Anyway, they started using them
and for the next 10 years
what happened in that land was a miracle
which it became, from that moment, the "Terra Institute".
I remember during the first planting,
sometimes dreamed that night was dying all.
Because the soil was horrible. He was in such bad shape
I wondered. Are the plants take root?
In the Atlantic Forest there were 400 different species,
we did not have 400,
but just we planted 100 species, 150 ...
It is true that the first planting lost 60%.
In the second, 40.
There were no books to teach to replant an Atlantic forest.
I love coming here
to see all these trees together.
When you see this forest mass,
an idea of ??the effort involved in planting all this is done.
When I was little,
there was a small waterfall.
All year, here was a waterfall that fell.
I came with my sisters and we made a picnic under the jump.
There was still a lot of forest.
Then
when felled trees, the water disappeared.
Now our forest is young, needs lots of water.
But within 10 or 15 years, when everything stabilizes,
I'm sure it will reappear another beautiful waterfall.
They are
many small roads,
hundreds of small ways ...
Cows go there.
Each leg of cow that sits on a small perimeter,
They are 200 or 250 kilos of blow.
Crushes the earth, the dry,
and no longer sprout again nothing.
It is very interesting to note the difference
of what it was before the Terra Institute, smooth pastures like this
and the other a fully recovered ecosystem.
With ten million trees replanted.
Here we see
cicada singing until he dies.
I'm sure it was not the tree.
Are the termites that are assimilating.
He will be buried here.
Sometimes, just we look at a tree and think about its verticality, in its beauty.
But everything depends on it, our water, our oxygen ...
It is home to everyone.
Ants, small insects, cicadas ...
All are in the tree.
It is very pleasant to touch a tree planting have helped.
It is here, well established, well robust.
Within 30 years it will be as well.
He is still very young, is growing.
Look, the youngest there, very young, here.
They may have erupted tonight,
like Alice entering the wonderland.
And most incredible is that it will become a tree 40 to 50 meters.
And who will live 400 years, 500 years.
Here there is a great power.
Think that these trees have three months
and will reach its climax at the 400 ...
Maybe we can measure from here
the concept of eternity.
Perhaps eternity can be measured.
The first few days after saying: "We will plant a forest"
I thought the route was a seed to a small tree, a plant ...
and that's it, but there is only a little plant, but a million.
And not just here.
Also nearby. And more and more!
And that's the most wonderful thing, this idea
You may evolve, it can grow.
He's not someone's idea, but of all.
Sampling method can replicate almost everywhere.
Of course, the species are not the same,
but the way of acting is the same
in all tropical forests.
The land was the remedy to despair of Sebastiao.
The joy of seeing the trees grow, resurgent outbreaks,
He resurrected Sebastiao passion for photography.
Although Lélia and he knew they could not return to their old ways.
We conclude
that would start a new photographic project on the environment.
Of course, the first idea that came
It was to denounce the destruction of forests,
or pollution of the oceans,
He did not care.
Then gradually we start thinking. Let's do a different project.
Let a tribute to the planet.
And we discover with surprise
nearly half of the planet
continues as the day of Genesis.
Many of my friends told me. "Do not get into that.
It is very risky. You are a good human, social photographer,
and now you will enter in the field
Photographers landscapes, animals. "
I said, "It's okay, I'm going for it!
I will learn to photograph these things too. "
And so I began the first story.
Galapagos wanted it.
Darwin wanted to understand what he understood.
The same species,
in very different ecosystems,
They have evolved very differently.
Looking at this detail of the leg of the iguana,
I can not help thinking
in the hand of a warrior of the Middle Ages.
With its metal to protect shells.
Looking at the structure of the hand,
I see that the iguana is also my cousin,
who we come from the same cell.
We were facing a being of this age.
We are dealing with an authority,
with all its wrinkles, with all this knowledge.
Certainly, when Darwin was here, that turtle was an adult.
Maybe he saw Darwin. Who knows?
I remember one time I was very tired
because he had walked through lava fields for a long time.
I had slept on the beach.
I felt something touch my leg.
I looked and it was a sea lion.
Had another installed across.
In the end, there were three sea lions.
No man considered a predator, did not seem a threat.
It was my first story of nature,
the first time photographing animals.
For 8 years, I had time to see ...
and understand the most important thing.
I am very nature as a turtle, like a tree,
like a stone.
His gaze remains extraordinary.
It is very deep.
I was up to me, I took a picture,
he put his finger in the mouth ...
He was looking for the first time in a mirror.
I was in front of him
and he removed his finger, put it.
He began to understand that it was him.
It was acknowledging his image. I felt completely identified.
It's a family like ours,
a grandfather, a father, children.
They will respect each other, you know?
And when you go, you have to respect their ways.
You have to sit in a particular way,
you have to respect their territory.
And then you receive.
I also became friends with a whale.
These are whales.
In Argentina.
An adult as this measures 35 meters and weighs 40 tons, more or less.
He was approaching, came to the ship.
I could touch it.
And it was amazing. That skin so sensitive!
While he is stroking,
He saw his tail shaking, at 35 meters.
A phenomenal sensitivity.
We had a small vessel of not more than seven meters.
I knew that if we looked strong, we could sink.
But he never touched the boat, never!
Sometimes he walked away and hit the sea with its tail.
Oh, it's another world, it's incredible.
I'll see if I have another photo here of the Nenets.
Check what does a Nenets.
It's your house.
I nenets this report with what was preparing a long time.
Were 18 people and about 6,000 reindeer
They are living in constant migration.
Here should be the 7pm.
About 8 light a fire
and make the only hot meal of the day.
After dinner, there are gatherings.
And the fire goes out.
While the fire burning is the temperature is pleasant: 15-20 degrees.
Two hours later, it is already 30 below zero.
They are real cowboys of Siberia.
Always wear ties
around the neck, made of reindeer skin.
They wear leather boots with silver fox.
Sleep with their boots. A boot lasts a lifetime.
The Obi is a very special river,
a large river in Siberia.
This is about 47 kilometers long.
When you pass the Obi, you enter the Arctic Circle.
We have no horizon line, we have nothing.
We are on a white plate on the size of the universe.
Genesis made Sebastiao again travel the world
for nearly a decade.
It was to show nature, animals, places and people
They are living as the beginning of time.
A more optimistic view of the same planet
Sebastiao had looked hurt and destroyed.
Genesis was to be his great work.
A love letter to the planet.
Zo'é had representations in writings of the sixteenth century Jesuits
Amazon coming and reported on a people
who wore a kind of tube in the lower lip.
These Indians never been seen.
We thought it was a fable
or an invention of the Jesuits,
until the end of the forties,
when we contacted them again.
Estado de Paré, Brasil Tribe Zoe, 2009
These Indians live in paradise.
The only place I've seen in my life
where women have 3, 4 or 5 husbands
and many other women's husbands.
The woman has a husband hunter,
un fisherman husband,
a husband who works a little agriculture
a husband who is close to home and helps you do all ...
Women have tremendous power.
Have dominion over from men,
bastante considerable.
Something that has always seemed very interesting to these peoples
It is that the people had a full awareness of their image.
When I was going to take a picture,
the person knew I was going to represent your image
At first they were somewhat interested, then let them be interested.
It was not his world.
However, I was very interested in my knife.
YPO my friend made me swear I'd give my knife.
But the head of the FNI
had made me promise not to give them anything,
to protect the purity of these Indians.
I said, "Look, we make a deal.
The day that you go and strip the knife out the window of the plane.
I will follow the path of the plane
and I find the knife. "
These plants are very old.
They are between 40 and 50 years.
The wonderful plants ...
ferns.
A shade plant, which grows in the middle of the jungle,
in the highest parts, here.
Hair reminds me of my mother.
My mother was a beautiful woman. Lot.
Those were your plants. When she died,
my father cared for him until he died.
After the we brought us.
Look, it's raining.
How pretty.
That land is very important to us.
We are closing a cycle with this land
and during that cycle she spent our lives.
He spent the lives of my parents,
step the life of my sisters,
and much of my life.
And now turn to add our lives to this.
My life and Leila again.
It remains our history.
It was part of my childhood and now it is my old age.
And the day I die,
We leave here the forest there was a bit before my time.
Therefore, you will complete a cycle.
It's the story of my life.
The man whose photographs have told us
thousands of stories about our planet,
It leaves us a great history and a great dream:
the destruction of nature can be reversed.
More than a thousand fountains watering again "Terra Institute".
There are already planted 2.5 million trees.
The wildlife has returned, even jaguars.
The earth is no longer possession of Salgado,
now a national park that belongs to everyone.
Is the demonstration that devastated lands anywhere
they can return to forest.