Sebasti茫o Salgado became famous for his portraits of humans struggling to survive in an unjust and violent world. He took astonishing photographs of the attempted assassination of US President Ronald Reagan, covered conflicts in Africa, the Balkans and the Middle East, and documented the lives of labourers and migrants in years-long, globe-spanning projects.
But after photographing the Rwandan genocide, Salgado became depressed, retreating to his family farm in Brazil. Dismayed by the environmental destruction he found, he began restoring the Atlantic rainforest there, which eventually inspired him to return to photography. The project followed, to capture 鈥渨hat was pristine and hadn鈥檛 been destroyed鈥� on the planet, as Selgado said in a 2024 , from the mountains of Alaska to the Indigenous peoples of the Amazon. These travels turned him into an environmentalist, Salgado said in another interview.
, published this month following Salgado鈥檚 death last year, collects 65 of the black-and-white shots of glaciers and other ice the photographer took for Genesis. The images are seemingly timeless, freeze-frames of the big and small movements of the coldest regions. A parade of penguins dive off an iceberg into the roiling seas off the South Sandwich Islands in the main image. Seabirds swoop low near a tower of ice in the same area in the shot below.
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But of course, the images aren鈥檛 timeless, as every year Earth loses 1000 glaciers, and the number is rising.聽On our current warming trajectory, about four-fifths of glaciers will disappear by 2100, including almost all in western Canada, the US and the Alps.
Pictured above is Salgado鈥檚 photograph of a massive glacier snaking through the mountains of Kluane National Park in Canada. Below, clouds envelope the ice mushroom atop Patagonia鈥檚 Cerro Torre.
Finally, the image below shows a glacier separating from the rocky shore in Chile鈥檚 Torres del Paine National Park, both of their surfaces worn rough by the flow of ice.
