Kuwait: A Desert on Fire / Eine Wuste in Flammen / Un Desert En Feu - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 3836561255 ISBN 13: 9783836561259

Publisher: Taschen America Llc, 2016

Synopsis

“We must remember that in the brutality of battle another such apocalypse is always just around the corner.” ―Sebastião Salgado

In January and February 1991, as the United States-led coalition drove Iraqi forces out of Kuwait, Saddam Hussein’s troops retaliated with an inferno. At some 700 oil wells and an unspecified number of oil-filled low-lying areas they ignited vast, raging fires, creating one of the worst environmental disasters in living memory.

As the desperate efforts to contain and extinguish the conflagration progressed, Sebastião Salgado traveled to Kuwait to witness the crisis firsthand. The conditions were excruciating. The heat was so vicious that Salgado’s smallest lens warped. A journalist and another photographer were killed when a slick ignited as they crossed it. Sticking close to the firefighters, and with characteristic sensitivity to both human and environmental impact, Salgado captured the terrifying scale of this “huge theater the size of the planet”: the ravaged landscape; the sweltering temperatures; the air choking on charred sand and soot; the blistered remains of camels; the sand still littered with cluster bombs; and the flames and smoke soaring to the skies, blocking out the sunlight, dwarfing the oil-coated firefighters.

Salgado’s epic pictures first appeared in the New York Times Magazine in June 1991 and were subsequently awarded the Oskar Barnack Award, recognizing outstanding images on the relationship between man and the environment. Kuwait: A Desert on Fire is the first monograph of this astonishing series. Like Genesis, Exodus, and The Children, it is as much a major document of modern history as an extraordinary body of photographic work.

About this title

From the Publisher

Sebastião Salgado was born in Aimorés, state of Minas Gerais, Brazil. A former economist, Salgado began his career in Paris as a professional photographer in 1973 and subsequently worked with the photo agencies Sygma, Gamma, and Magnum Photos. In 1994, Lélia Wanick Salgado and Sebastião Salgado created Amazonas images, an agency that handles exclusively his work. Salgado travels throughout the world for his photographic projects which have been featured in numerous international periodicals as well as books, including Other Americas (1986), Sahel: l'homme en détresse (1986), Workers (1993), Terra (1997), Migrations (2000), and The Children (2000). Exhibitions of these bodies of work tour internationally. Salgado has been awarded numerous major photographic prizes in recognition of his accomplishments and is a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador. Together Lélia and Sebastião have been working since 1991 on the restoration of a small part of the Brazilian Atlantic Rainforest, in the Rio Doce Valley, where they created Instituto Terra, a natural reserve and environmental educational center. Salgado's current photographic project is Genesis, a series of black-and-white photographs of landscapes, wildlife, and human communities around the globe that represents a search for nature in its original state.

From the Author

Lélia Deluiz Wanick Salgado, born in Vitoria, Brazil, studied Architecture and Urban Planning in Paris. Her interest in photography started in the early 1970s and she moved on to conceiving and designing photography books and organizing exhibitions, among which were numerous books and exhibitions by Sebastião Salgado. In 1994, Lélia Wanick Salgado and Sebastião Salgado created Amazonas Images, a press agency in Paris handling only Salgado's work. Lélia is the director of the agency.

About this edition

• Publisher: Taschen America Llc
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 3836561255
• ISBN 13: 9783836561259
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 205
• Editor: Salgado Llia Wanick