Salgado's new Genesis project


Marine iguanas are extremely gentle and
live in complete harmony with the other animals.

From today's Guardian: Sebastião Salgado is embarking on the last of his great photographic projects, which will appear regularly in the Guardian over the next eight years. He is seeking out places that are still as pristine as they were in primeval times, places that provide hope.

His previous projects...' left him questioning his faith in humanity. He had seen so much man-made suffering. The idealist began to have his doubts about our essential goodness. "I was injured in my heart and my spirit. For me, it was terrible what I saw. I came away from this with incredible despair." He was desperate to find something that would restore faith.
Hence Genesis. Yes, we may already have destroyed 50% of the planet, but Salgado wants to show us what we have left, and what we stand to lose if we don't take care.

In the end, the only heritage we have is our planet, and I have decided to go to the most pristine places on the planet and photograph them in the most honest way I know, with my point of view, and of course it is in black and white, because it is the only thing I know how to do. I want to see if I can put a kind of virginity in these pictures, if you can say that, and to show 100% respect to nature and the animals."'

• Guardian special report: Salgado's Genesis project (including photographs and introduction by Salgado)
• Salgado's Exodus at the Barbican: his previous project on migrants
  

Heaney on Milosz

Also in today's Guardian Seamus Heaney remembers Czeslaw Milosz: 'though he confronted the brutality of the modern age, Czeslaw Milosz believed in the joy-bringing potential of art'.

See earlier blog on 22 August.