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Monday, June 3, 2013

No one captures our world's natural beauty quite like Sebastião Salgado. The Brazilian photographer has traversed the earth, battling extreme conditions, travelling by land, air, and sea in the pursuit of untouched landscapes and the indigenous people and animals who populate them. His black-and-white images unite photojournalism and art, and introduce an urban viewer to corners of the world that have not felt the irreversible influence of modernization. Salgado's latest triumph is Genesis; a brilliantly executed book of images gathered over an eight-year expedition through deserts, oceans, tundra, and forests. The book, which Salgado aptly describes as his "love letter to the planet," not only serves as an aesthetic marvel, but also as a startling reminder of the unseen worlds our technological progress inevitably impacts. From lions and leopards in Africa to the monstrous glaciers of Alaska, the gorillas inhabiting volcanic regions of Uganda to the whales of the South Atlantic, Genesis teeters on surrealism in that its images seem too epic to be real.