Sociological Forum, Vol. 26, No.

2, June 2011
DOI: 10.1111/j.1573-7861.2011.01250.x

Images, Ideology, and Praxis in the Environmental

Movement: Sebastião Salgado’s Genesis Project
Thomas K. Rudel1

This article is part of a panel discussion addressing the sociological relevance of Sebastião Salgado’s
work as well as documentary photography in general.2 I focus specifically on environmental
sociology.
KEY WORDS: documentation; environmental sociology; Genesis project; photography; social
issues; visual sociology.

INTRODUCTION

The earth is turning into a ‘‘planet of weeds’’ (Quammen, 1998). This

claim resonates with environmentally concerned people because with each
passing year exotic species dominate a larger extent of the globe (Lockwood et
al., 2007). Invasive species like kudzu, imperata grass, zebra mussels, bracken
fern, and Asian carp usually get their start with the helping hand of humans,
either directly by introducing the species or indirectly by disturbing a commu-
nity and through the disturbance, like fire, providing an opportunity for the
invasive species to spread (Schneider, 2006). It is not going too far to say that
humans are the preeminent invasive species (Perkins, 2007). Following this line
of reasoning, the spread of weeds and their like would be an example of co-
evolution (Norgaard, 1994) in which humans have spread across the globe and
brought with them other invasives. Human-induced climate change, with the
massive disturbances that it portends for plant and animal communities,
would raise this dynamic to a global scale, providing new opportunities for
invasive species to establish themselves in fast-changing, disturbed environ-
ments.

1
Departments of Human Ecology and Sociology, Rutgers University, Cook Office Building,
Room 214, New Brunswick, New Jersey 08901; e-mail: rudel@aesop.rutgers.edu.
2
See Carr (2011) for details of the session. For other essays from the session, see Gold (2011),
Kay (2011), Sassen (2011), and Wolford (2011).

431

Ó 2011 Eastern Sociological Society

432 Rudel

THE GENESIS PROJECT

Against this sobering backdrop, Sebastião Salgado, the world-renowned

Brazilian photographer, launched his Genesis project in 2004. In Salgado’s
words (2010) Genesis:
is about our planet earth, nature and its beauty, and what remains of it today despite
the manifold destruction caused by human activity. Genesis is an attempt to portray the
beauty and the majesty of regions that are still in a pristine condition, areas where land-
scapes and wildlife are still unspoiled, places where human communities continue to live
according to their ancient culture and traditions.

Salgado calls his project ‘‘Genesis’’ because he wants to capture visually

what the world looked like ‘‘in a pristine state’’ thousands of years ago before
humans began disturbing landscapes on a massive scale. He wants to help de-
racinated urban people ‘‘rediscover’’ the natural world and, in so doing,
appreciate and respect it anew (Singer and Salgado, 2010). To this end,
Salgado records life in beautiful, relatively undisturbed environments with the
black and white film in his camera. His subjects are landscapes and their
inhabitants, both people and other creatures. Having devoted decades to
chronicling the struggles of one species (homo sapiens), he wants, in his words,
to spend some time taking pictures of other species. ‘‘There is no difference
photographing a pelican or an albatross and photographing a human being.
You must pay attention to them, spend time with them, respect their terri-
tory,’’ says Salgado (Finkel, 2009). He wants to record the lives of his subjects
in their landscapes, so he travels a lot. Since 2004, Salgado has traveled, liter-
ally, to the ends of the earth, some 15 times for stays of four to six weeks to
photograph nature’s creation in a place or among a particular people.
His work from Genesis can be found at http://www.amazonasimages.com/
grands-travaux?PHPSESSID=113e2cad0ca79fa7bffa32a94ecf368.
The photos sometimes include people living in a rough ecological balance
with their surroundings, like hunter-gathers in the Kalahari desert and shifting
cultivators in Amazon rain forests. Probably half the photos focus on indige-
nous peoples, ranging from the Bushmen of interior Australia, to the Dinkas
of southern Sudan, and the Amerindians of the Upper Xingu River in the
Amazon basin. The other photo portfolios come from landscapes as diverse
as Antarctica, the Galapagos, the Kamchatka peninsula, and the Virunga
mountains in Rwanda; some focus on particular species like seals, whales, or
gorillas; others concentrate on features of landscapes, like sand dunes in
Namibia or mountains in Patagonia.
When Salgado goes into the field, he becomes, like all skilled ethnogra-
phers, a participant observer. In his words, ‘‘he just joins the group.’’ He stays
long enough for his subjects to get used to him and, if his subjects are people,
he does the same thing that they do. When he visits the N’oe in the Brazilian
Amazon and the N’oe decide to go hunting, Salgado goes hunting with them,
even if it means sloshing through some snake-friendly swamps for hours on
end. He shows people his photographs as he produces them. In composing his
Sebastião Salgado’s Genesis Project 433

shots, Salgado tries to convey the dignity of his subjects. He does so, in part,
by taking photographs in which people and animals look at the camera. In
the case of the animals, Salgado waits until the animal looks at the camera
before he takes the picture. The gaze into the camera produces a moment of
communication between subject and viewer. On a trip to Antarctica with
Salgado, one journalist noted that ‘‘it is hard not to read into those looks
from animals a silent plea for the Kyoto protocol’’ (Parker, 2005).
Back in Paris after a trip, Salgado sorts through the photographs, decid-
ing to keep some and discard others. The photographs then appear in the
mass circulation media, such as the Manchester Guardian and Paris Match,
that underwrite Salgado’s work. Eventually, the photographs make their way
into books that are compendia of Salgado’s work on a particular project.
Through the mass media outlets, Salgado’s images speak powerfully to the
general public about pressing social issues, in this instance environmental
destruction.
Salgado’s projects convey a sense of urgency because they chronicle some
sort of exploitation, so it is not surprising that Salgado, a ‘‘former Marxist,’’
builds a dimension of practical action (praxis) to address the problem into
each project (Finkel, 2009). People who engage in praxis enact in their daily
lives the political and philosophical orientations that they espouse (Habermas,
1973). In Salgado’s early work he joined forces with the nongovernmental
organization (NGO) Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF) to document the plight
of drought-stricken peoples in the Sahel. They began this partnership with the
hope that Salgado’s photographs might galvanize more people to contribute
to the MSF effort. The proceeds from the later sale of a book of photographs
went to MSF. With Genesis Salgado’s praxis has taken a different form. He
has purchased his parents’ deforested and degraded 1,505-acre farm in the
imperiled Atlantic forest zone in Minas Gerais, Brazil, and he is restoring the
land on the farm to its natural state by replanting it with native tree species.
Salgado has established an NGO, Instituto Terra, which carries out the
replanting and uses the land on the farm as an environmental education center
for children (Instituto Terra, 2010; Parker, 2005). This kind of commitment to
action characterizes all Salgado’s projects.

CRITICISMS

Like all high-profile artists, Salgado has his critics. Some of them have
argued that the beauty of his photographs sometimes masks and even com-
mercializes the suffering that they portray (Parker, 2005). While Genesis has
not generated this sort of criticism, the catalog of scientific and scholarly crit-
ics who might raise questions about the rationale for Genesis is quite lengthy.
Brief descriptions of these criticisms follow.
Postcolonial commentators might criticize the way that Salgado charac-
terizes people in the Genesis project as either pristine indigenous peoples or
434 Rudel

acculturated polluters. This binary resurrects a colonial, orientalist way of

thinking that in the past has denied a voice to marginalized peoples (Said,
1978; Spivak, 1988). Ecologists could find fault with Salgado’s frequent choice
of mega-fauna like whales as subjects because it reinforces what some see as
excessive popular attention concentrated on a few signature species (Henry,
2010). Salgado’s admiration for groups of indigenous people who ‘‘live in a
balance’’ with nature resurrects outmoded notions that equilibria characterize
ecosystems. Ecologists increasingly see ecological communities as fluctuating
over time in unpredictable and substantively important ways (Botkin, 1990).
Salgado’s idea that there are environments undisturbed by humans could be
contested by a wide range of scientists who would cite evidence of human
impacts on even the most remote ecosystems (Roosevelt, 1989). Similarly,
world systems theorists in sociology would contend that capitalism’s influences
reaches into every corner of the globe (Goldfrank et al., 1999). Environmental
sociologists would find in Salgado’s work evidence of preservationist thinking
that emphasizes the value of preserving undisturbed environments even if it
involves excluding some growing populations of indigenous peoples from their
lands (Brulle, 2000). While growing numbers of ecologists might value that
perspective (Terborgh, 1999), social scientists might object to the absence of
concern in preservationist positions for the negative redistributive effects of
park creation (Brechin et al., 2003).
Students of development could critique Salgado’s assumption that con-
temporary indigenous peoples resemble the way all humans lived 4,000 years
ago. This line of reasoning stems from a developmental paradigm ‘‘that all
societies are on the same pathway or trajectory of change, with each going
through the same stages of development’’ but at different times (Thornton,
2005:3). In this reading, contemporary indigenous peoples living in an isolated
state are much like our less technologically sophisticated ancestors from earlier
tribal or group-based societies. In the contemporary differences between tech-
nologically simple indigenous peoples and technologically well-equipped
urbanites, one can see a history of human progression through the ages. These
theorists, including Salgado, ‘‘read history sideways’’ (Thornton, 2005). Most
contemporary theorists of development would maintain that latecomers to
political and economic development do so in a way that is different from the
first few societies to acquire industrial technologies (Cardoso and Faletto,
1973; Gerschenkron, 1962).
The points elaborated above could be used to pick apart Salgado’s ratio-
nale for why he undertook Genesis, but they seem excessively scholastic, con-
cerned with preexisting debates among small groups of academics. In this
respect, the critics miss the larger import of Salgado’s efforts. With his photo-
graphs, Salgado speaks to a different, less disciplinary audience, and he does
so in a different medium. For his purposes, the words in his explanations mat-
ter less than the images in his portfolio. The immediacy of the experiences
depicted in the photographs stirs even those of us who are familiar with the
problems he catalogs. With Genesis and his other projects, Salgado hopes to
Sebastião Salgado’s Genesis Project 435

appeal through his images to our aesthetic selves and through the aesthetic to
our emotional selves and through the emotions to our political selves. With
this agenda, perhaps the most important issue that Salgado raises for sociolo-
gists is one of praxis.

PRAXIS

The praxis that animates Salgado’s involvement with everyone of his pro-
jects offers a useful example to natural and social scientists who want to do
more for the environmental movement besides providing it with research. With
the exception of several high-profile natural scientists, such as James Hansen
and the late Stephen Schneider, most scientists involved in research on climate
change have rarely gone beyond their roles as scientists in expressing their
political commitments to environmental reforms. In other words, their partici-
pation in the environmental movement is marked by an absence of praxis.
This occupational posture shows up in several different ways in activities gen-
erated by concern with global warming. I have witnessed and, lamentably,
engaged in all these activities.
1. Refusing to step outside the scientific role: At panels meant to inform the
public about the 2007 IPCC report, natural scientists at my university did
not want to answer questions from the public about ‘‘what we can do’’
because it was outside their field of expertise. The predominant attitude is:
we scientists will work on getting the science right and, because we are
important and disinterested, you will listen to our findings and implement
the appropriate policies. This stance underestimates the personal and politi-
cal difficulties of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
2. Doing well while doing good: The increased concern, at least in some circles,
about global warming has created occupational opportunities for both natu-
ral scientists and environmental social scientists. There are more conferences
to attend, more commissions to join, and larger homes to purchase. With
these activities comes a larger carbon footprint, but in the case of those of
us who do research on climate change, there is a dispensation, a kind of eco-
logical indulgence, because in our professional lives we work on solutions to
environmental problems. It seems okay to generate a lot of carbon in one’s
personal life if it is devoted in some diffuse way to reducing carbon-intensive
activities by others. In other words, look at what I say, not what I do. Seri-
ous personal efforts to limit personal carbon footprints would underline just
how hard it is to do and, oddly enough, this kind of praxis might have a
political payoff, making us more appreciative of the difficulties of environ-
mental reforms and more willing to acknowledge that conversion to the
environmental cause often proceeds as much by example as by exhortation.
The point about Sebastião Salgado’s praxis is, then, that he does it. He
seems to realize that engaging with social issues as either an artist or as a
436 Rudel

scientist almost demands a form of praxis if we want to be taken seriously

beyond the confines of our professional communities. Salgado, in this sense,
provides us with a model of how to engage with social issues in a way that
is cognizant of our audiences, respectful of our subjects, and committed
enough to reforms to do something personally to help them come to pass.
For him, the dark vision of a ‘‘planet of weeds’’ is too sobering.

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