A Fireside Chat and Reception with Photographer Sebastião Salgado

By Invitation Only

Within Asia Society’s purpose to navigate shared futures between Asia and the world, sustainability has become an increasingly important consideration. Last year’s COP26 summit emphasized the work that still must be done to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2100, even as 2021 saw sea levels rise to a record high and developing countries suffer economic losses three times greater than those of wealthy nations.

In Asia, the impacts of climate change echo across the continent in myriad ways, and the responses of Asian nations to the climate crisis are just as diverse. While China, the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and India, the third largest, argued for the ability to continue to use coal and fossil fuels, the representatives from the island nation of the Maldives pleaded for greater action: “For us, this is a matter of survival.”

In conjunction with Asia Society Southern California’s April Advisory Board meeting, we’ll turn our attention toward a region whose impact on the global ecosystem is just as important as Asia’s—the Amazon rainforest. Continuing in the tradition of Asia Society programming such as Coal + Ice, which visualizes the climate crisis, the work of Sebastião Salgado powerfully makes the case for taking action today in the face of environmental destruction.

For Salgado’s latest epic project “Amazônia,” on the Brazilian Rainforest, he spent nine years and 48 trips disappearing into the forest for weeks, sometimes months at a time, returning with new stories and feelings of communality. Seeing the pristine Amazonian Forests through Salgado’s unique lens is a clarion call to preserve a world that threatens to be lost. Or as Salgado put it himself: "My wish, with all my heart, with all my energy, with all the passion I possess, is that in 50 years’ time this collection of images will not resemble a record of a world lost. Amazonia must live on."

Join us on April 28, 2022 at Peter Fetterman Gallery, Salgado’s main world gallery for over 30 years, for an exclusive conversation between Peter Fetterman and Sebastião Salgado, followed by a short film screening and reception.

Sebastião Salgado presented ‘AMAZÔNIA' (Taschen, 2021) in conversation with Peter Fetterman as part of Photo London’s digital talks programme and Book Club. Watch the conversation here.

Speakers:

Having studied economics, Sebastião Salgado began his career as a professional photographer in 1973 in Paris. Salgado worked with photo agencies including Magnum Photos until 1994, when he and Lélia Wanick Salgado founded Amazonas images, formed exclusively for his work. He has travelled in over 100 countries for his photographic projects. Beyond press publications his work was presented in books such as Other Americas (1986), Sahel: l’homme en détresse (1986), Workers (1993), Terra (1997), Migrations and Portraits (2000), Africa (2007), Genesis (2013), The Scent of a Dream (2015), Kuwait, a desert on fire (2016), and Gold, Serra Pelada Gold Mine (2019). Touring exhibitions of these works have been, and continue to be, presented in museums and galleries throughout the world. A majority of these have been curated by Lélia Wanick Salgado.

Sebastião Salgado is a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, and among other distinctions, he was named an honorary member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences in the USA. He has received numerous photographic prizes and prestigious honors, such as the Grand Prix National, Ministry of Culture, France; the Príncipe de Asturias Award for Arts, Spain; the Medal of Presidenza della Repubblica Italiana, International, Research Center Pio Manzù, Italy. Since the 1990’s, Lélia and Sebastião have decided to go beyond recording the condition of the planet and become directly engaged themselves by reforesting a family property in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais with the original species of the Atlantic forest. Through the Instituto Terra, as the project is named, over the past 20 years, 2.5 million saplings of native species have been planted and 800 hectares restored.

Born in London, Peter Fetterman has been deeply involved in the medium of photography for over 40 years. Initially a filmmaker and collector, he set up his first gallery over 30 years ago in 1988. He was one of the pioneer tenants of Bergamot Station, the Santa Monica Center of the Arts when it first opened in 1994.

The gallery has one of the largest inventories of classic 20th Century photography in the country particularly in humanist photography. Diverse holdings include work by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Sebastião Salgado, Steve McCurry, Ansel Adams, Paul Caponigro, Willy Ronis, André Kertesz, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Lillian Bassman, Pentti Sammallahti, Sarah Moon and Jeffrey Conley.

Fetterman and his colleagues are committed to promoting the awareness and appreciation of the most powerful of the mediums in an intimate, user-friendly salon environment.

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