Photography has the power to create desires, hopes and ideas. A snapshot that captures a moment, expressing and telling a story, a journey, an adventure or a point in time.

Nature strikes us with its magnificence, showing its intrinsic beauty, charm and mystery, and Sebastião Salgado uses his writing with light to present us with the Amazon, an ancient and distant place.

From 12 May to 19 November 2023 at the Fabbrica del Vapore, an exhibition dedicated to one of the greatest contemporary photographers: Sebastião Salgado. More than 200 works with which the Brazilian artist presents his Amazon, more as a philosopher than photographer, bringing together in a single image the three ideals of Plato: Truth, Goodness and Beauty. Goodness is expressed though the celebration of this natural lung; unique, immense and essential to humankind, while beauty is paraphrased by the faces, particularly of women, which still hold a charm that was celebrated by Renaissance artists, with the male face immortalized in the style of certain Byzantine iconography. All his representations, including the wilder images, capture the infinite valleys, governed by a natural order and marked by the rhythm of the rivers, or the more elegant pictures that narrate the traditions and rituals of hundreds of ethnic communities and groups, presented as distant in time and far removed from any contact with the contemporary world. Salgado has invented a unique language for these peoples, one that encompasses approximately two hundred different dialects; he has imagined a flag for them that expresses pride, freedom for their world, returning attention to a form of humanity more similar to that which inhabited the Earth two thousand years ago, presenting us with everything that we have lost but that nature still conserves.

Lyrical, epic, dramatic and anecdotal galleries of photographs that express what is, and demonstrate what happens, without comment or protest; a way to understand situations, showing concern and attention for his native land, the world he has inhabited, the world he knows and represents. The exhibition is accompanied by a soundtrack composed specifically for the occasion by Jean-Michel Jarre and inspired by the sounds of the forest; the wind through the trees, the cries of the animals, birdsong or the crashing of the water as it thunders down the mountains. The exhibition, curated by the Brazilian photographer’s wife Lélia Wanick Salgado, is surprising and fascinating. It discusses and shocks, presenting everything through Salgado’s typical black and white; so profound, so tangible, almost real.