Exhibition

Sebastião Salgado. Kuwait

30 Mar 2017 – 29 Apr 2017

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For his second solo exhibition at Sundaram Tagore Chelsea, world-renowned photographer Sebastião Salgado presents a selection of stunning monochromatic photographs from his landmark series Kuwait.

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Shot in 1991 as the Gulf War drew to a close, the images in this show chronicle the raging oil well fires ignited by Saddam Hussein’s forces as they retreated from Kuwait. This exhibition of stunning photographs, curated by Lélia Wanick Salgado, lays bare the devastating environmental consequences of war.


Considered one of the worst man-made environmental disasters in history, this event began when Saddam Hussein, recognizing the war was over, ordered his retreating military forces to ignite some 700 oil wells and a number of oil-filled low-lying areas in an attempt to destroy the region’s most sought-after natural resource. It took nearly eight months and the Herculean efforts of firefighters from around the world to contain the towering infernos. As their efforts progressed, Sebastião Salgado, on assignment from The New York Times Magazine, traveled to Kuwait to document the disaster firsthand.
 
Upon his arrival, Salgado encountered unbelievably brutal conditions—billowing flames and suffocating black clouds releasing tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and heat so fierce it warped the photographer’s smallest camera lens. The circumstances were so perilous that a journalist and another photographer covering the story were both killed when an oil slick they were crossing ignited. Staying in close proximity to the firefighters, Salgado endured the intense heat, smoke and toxic fumes to document the workers’ unyielding efforts to extinguish the fires as they ravaged the landscape, leaving a horrific trail of soot, blackened sand and the charred remains of camels.
 
This epic series first appeared in The New York Times Magazine in 1991 and has since been hailed as one of Salgado’s most compelling—and courageous—bodies of work. It earned him the prestigious Oskar Barnack Award, which recognizes outstanding photography on the relationship between man and the environment.
 
The images from this show are the subject of a recently released book titled Kuwait: A Desert on Fire (Taschen, 2016), the first published monograph of this series. Edited by Lélia Wanick Salgado, the book is also available in a limited collector’s edition signed by the artist.

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Sebastião Salgado

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