Sebastiao Salgado. Kuwait. A Desert on Fire

ISBN-13: 9783836561259 / Angielski / Twarda / 2016 / 208 str.

Sebastiao Salgado; Lelia Wanick Salgado

Opis

Desert aflame
Sebastiao Salgado documents the torched Kuwaiti oil wells

In January and February 1991, as the United States-led coalition drove Iraqi forces out of Kuwait, Saddam Hussein s troops retaliated with an inferno. At some 700 oil wells and an unspecified number of oil-filled low-lying areas they ignited vast, raging fires, sending billowing black clouds over the region and thousands of tons of nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

As the desperate efforts to contain and extinguish the conflagration progressed, Sebastiao Salgado traveled to Kuwait to witness the crisis firsthand. The conditions were excruciating. The heat was so vicious that Salgado s smallest lens warped. A journalist and another photographer were killed when a slick ignited as they crossed it. Sticking close to the firefighters, and with characteristic sensitivity to both human and envrionmental impact, Salgado captured the terrifying scale of this huge theater the size of the planet the ravaged landscape; the sweltering temperatures; the air choking on charred sand and soot; the blistered remains of camels; the sand still littered with cluster bombs; and the flames and smoke soaring to the skies, blocking out the sunlight, dwarfing the oil-coated firefighters.

Salgado s epic pictures first appeared in the New York Times Magazine in June 1991 and were subsequently widely published and awarded the Oskar Barnack Award, recognizing outstanding images on the relationship between man and the environment. Kuwait: A Desert on Fire is the first monograph of this astonishing series. Like Genesis, Exodus, and The Children, it is as much a major document of modern history as an extraordinary body of photographic work.

Text in English, French, and German"

O autorze

Salgado, Sebastião
Sebastião Salgado begann 1973 seine berufliche Karriere als Fotograf in Paris und arbeitete in der Folge für die Fotoagenturen Sygma, Gamma und Magnum Photos. Im Jahr 1994 gründete er gemeinsam mit seiner Frau Lélia Wanick Salgado die Agentur Amazonas images, die sein Werk exklusiv vertritt. Salgados fotografische Projekte wurden in zahlreichen Ausstellungen und Büchern gezeigt, darunter Sahel, L'Homme en détresse (1986), Other Americas (1986), Arbeiter (1993), Terra (1997), Migranten (2000), Kinder der Migration (2000), Africa (2007), Genesis (2013) und Kuwait, Eine Wüste in Flammen (2016). Salgado, Lélia Wanick
Lélia Wanick Salgado studierte Architektur und Stadtplanung in Paris. Ihr Interesse für die Fotografie entdeckte sie 1970. Seit den 1980er-Jahren konzipiert und gestaltet sie die Mehrzahl der Fotobände von Sebastião Salgado und organisiert alle Ausstellungen seines Werkes. Seit 1994 ist Lélia Wanick Salgado Geschäftsführerin von Amazonas images.