For his first solo exhibition at Sundaram Tagore New York, Sebastião Salgado, one of the world’s most respected photographers, presents iconic black-and-white images spanning thirty years of his career.

The exhibition, which debuted at Sundaram Tagore Singapore (May 2014) and traveled to Sundaram Tagore Hong Kong (October 2014), showcases forty photographs from five series, including ‘Genesis’, Workers and ‘Migrations’.

Sebastião Salgado has made it his life’s work to document the impact of globalisation on humankind. In the past three decades he has travelled to more than one hundred countries for his photographic projects and devotes years to each series in order to grasp the full scope of his topic.

In his ‘Workers’ and ‘Migrations’ series, Salgado captures the fragility and fortitude of the human spirit and infuses empathy and respect for his subjects. In Workers (1986–1993), his images tell the story of firefighters in Kuwait’s oil fields and gold miners at Serra Pelada, Brazil. ‘Migrations’ (1993–1999) documents the mass displacement of people across thirty-five countries as a result of social, political, economic and environmental disparities.

‘Genesis’, his most recent series, which was eight years in the making, comprises hauntingly beautiful photographs of pristine landscapes, serene wildlife and ancient civilizations. Salgado made more than thirty-two trips, capturing remote realities and paying homage to unspoiled nature: surreal icebergs in Antarctica, the isolated Zo’é tribe in Brazil, monumental crevices in Arizona’s Grand Canyon, and Africa’s native animals in Kafue National Park, Zambia.

A Genesis museum exhibition, curated by Lélia Wanick Salgado, has been traveling worldwide and was most recently on view at the International Center of Photography, New York–the first American venue to host this historic exhibition.

Sebastião Salgado is Brazilian-born and based in Paris. He was born in Aimorés, in the state of Minas Gerais, in 1944. In 1963, Salgado moved to São Paulo and trained as an economist. It was not until the early 1970s, after his wife loaned him a camera, that he embarked on a career as a photographer, eventually settling in Paris. Salgado has said that given his childhood and background in economics, it was only natural that he become a photographer gravitating toward humanistic themes.

Salgado’s work has been the subject of solo shows at the Barbican Art Gallery, London; the International Center of Photography, New York; the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C.; the Photographers’ Gallery and the Natural History Museum, London; and the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Among his many honours, Salgado has been named a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador and an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Since the 1990s Salgado and his wife, Lélia Wanick Salgado, have been restoring a 676-hectare portion of the Atlantic Forest in Brazil. In 1998 they founded the nonprofit Instituto Terra, an organisation focused on reforestation and environmental education. In recognition of Instituto Terra, the Salgados received the e-award in Education by Instituto-E in partnership with UNESCO Brazil and the Municipality of Rio de Janeiro as well as the Personalidade Ambiental Prize from the World Wildlife Fund, Brazil.