Sebastião Salgado: Photographic Images of a World in Distress

November 29, 2022

Sebastião Salgado: Photographic Images of a World in Distress

Event Series: A Bent but Beautiful World: Literature, Art, and the Environment

Assembled over the course of an eight-year global expedition, Brazilian photojournalist Sebastião Salgado’s Genesis (2013) project provides images of vast and remote regions where nature reigns in silent and pristine majesty. At the exhibition of Genesis in Lisbon in 2015 Léila Wanick Salgado, Sebastião Salgado's wife and a fellow Brazilian filmmaker and environmentalist, said, “Genesis is a quest for the world as it was, as it was formed, as it evolved, as it existed for millennia before modern life accelerated and began distancing us from the very essence of our being.” But what kind of nature is in view here? In the Anthropocene epoch, can we really speak of pristine or unspoiled landscapes? Could we ever?

In this presentation, Dr. Tim Howles reflected on and analyzed Salgado’s photography of nature—and the human gaze that invariably frames it. Michael Scott, director of the Future of the Humanities Project, provided opening and closing remarks, and Kathryn Temple and Rev. Joseph Simmons, S.J., moderated a Q&A session following the presentation.

This event was sponsored by the Future of the Humanities Project; the Georgetown Humanities Initiative; the Georgetown Master's Program in the Engaged and Public Humanities; Campion Hall, Oxford; and Las Casas Institute (Blackfriars Hall, Oxford). It is part of the one-year-long series: A Bent but Beautiful World: Literature, Art, and the Environment.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Steve Jurvetson

Participants

Tim Howles

Tim Howles is associate director of the Laudato Si’ Research Institute, based at Campion Hall, Oxford. The institute seeks to generate cutting-edge research contributions for societal transformation on the most pressing ecological and social issues of our day. His particular interests lie at the intersection of politics and theology, with a focus on the contemporary planetary crisis. His book, The Political Theology of Bruno Latour: Globalisation, Secularisation and Environmental Crisis, will be published with Edinburgh University Press in 2023. Howles is also an ordained Anglican priest.

Kathryn Temple

Kathryn Temple (moderator) is a professor in the Department of English at Georgetown University where she has taught since 1994. She specializes in the study of law and the humanities. Among her publications are Loving Justice: Legal Emotions in William Blackstone’s England (2019) and the co-edited Research Handbook on Law and Emotions (2021). Her humanities outreach activities include work with military veterans and the incarcerated.

Rev. Joseph Simmons, S.J.

Rev. Joseph Simmons, S.J., (moderator) is an American Catholic priest currently writing his doctoral thesis at Campion Hall, Oxford. He is exploring the Christian imagination and the fertile place where belief and unbelief touch in the fiction of Virginia Woolf and Marilynne Robinson. Simmons previously studied theology at Boston College and the Harvard Divinity School. His Licentiate in Sacred Theology thesis, “Via Literaria: Marilynne Robinson's Theology Through a Literary Imagination,” explored the convergence of literary and Christian imaginations.

The Future of the Humanities Project