Let There Be Light: Wauja People and the Practice of Photographic Primitivism in Sebastião Salgado'sGenesis

Abstract

Sebastião Salgado's 2013 photographic book Genesis is analyzed as a work of primitivist realism. This analysis is based on ethnography of the photographer's encounter with Wauja people in Brazil in 2005 while he was taking photographs for the book. Primitivism has a long history in the production of images of indigenous subjects in anthropology, and it often projects through its images a narrative suggesting a separation between the modern and the premodern. The realist dimensions of photography reinscribe the spatiotemporal divide, whereas the artistic dimensions of Salgado's black‐and‐white images of indigenous people featured in Genesis suggest romantic nostalgia.

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