Sebastião Salgado and the Royal Collections. Meetings around landscape photography

Landscape photography pays tribute to the formidable richness of our planet. Through the eyes of different photographers, we explore the relationship between man and nature, and embark ourselves on a journey to rediscover new ways of perceiving the world.

Following the current challenge of sustainability, this exhibition invites us to travel through beautiful landscapes guided by their creators. Around twenty photographers from the 19th century illustrate the show with works from the Royal Collections of Patrimonio Nacional. Held within the Archivo General de Palacio and the Real Biblioteca, these collections were mainly created thanks to the fascination for photography of Queen Isabella II of Spain, which prompted the arrival in the country of pioneers such as Charles Clifford, William Atkinson, and Jean Laurent. At the time, foreign photographers generally travelled on commission to record public works or cultural events, but their lenses often rested on the natural surroundings they encountered: a myriad of forests, mountains, and endless seas.

A century later, Sebastião Salgado, Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts 1998, threw himself into capturing the most magnificent and unknown nature, devoid of all human trace. The dialogue of his work with ancient photography makes landscape the guiding thread with which to achieve the experience of the sublime. As a result, photographs so distant in time and place bear striking similarities which, when set in parallel, help us to reflect on our relationship with the environment and warn us of possible risks.

This exhibition has been made possible thanks to ACCIONA, as further proof of its support for cultural preservation and dissemination from the perspective of sustainability. The company thus interprets culture as a fundamental element in generating a positive impact on people and the planet; a commitment shared with Patrimonio Nacional and PHotoESPAÑA, that seeks to promote new debates inspired by the arts with which to explore fascinating chapters of our history.

A leading figure in today's photographic scene, Sebastião Salgado was born in the small Brazilian town of Aimorés in 1944. He studied economics in São Paulo and while working in London for the International Coffee Organisation in the early 1970s, he travelled around Africa on several missions for the World Bank, shooting the landscapes he encountered. Deeply moved by that experience, he abandoned his career and entered the world of photography, working with prestigious agencies Sygma, Gamma, and Magnum Photos. In 1994, he and his wife, Lélia Wanick Salgado, founded Amazonas Images, an association intended to manage all of his work: a vast compendium of images from his travels to more than 120 countries.

Under the uniformity of black and white, and with a brilliant mastery of chiaroscuro, Salgado's photography presents a universal hymn to the richness and value of life. His gaze rests on different locations around the world, especially those mistreated by first-world societies and those, scarce, that still survive free of all human trace. In both cases, through overwhelming portraits and landscapes, Salgado explores the notions of the beautiful and the sublime, while emphasizing their vulnerability; as threatened nooks, they reveal the photographer's main concerns: social injustice and environmental degradation.

In an attempt to do their bit, he and his wife Lélia started Terra Institute, a project to reforest the farm where the photographer grew up in Aimorés. Since the early 2000s, they have planted more than two million trees, which, with great care, time, and patience, have given back to the area its original ecosystem. Now, hundreds of species of plants and animals coexist in a former dryland, proving that there is still hope for the preservation of this planet that we all call our home.

In both 19th-century landscape photography and Salgado's work, photographers pay homage to nature in its pure state, portraying the primordial elements that converge in its creation - earth, water, air, and fire - thereby transforming our perception of the landscape and our relationship with it. It is here that the notion of the sublime, formulated by Edmund Burke in his treatise A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), emerges, as the feeling of insignificance that invades us when we contemplate the immensity of nature. This universal concept of the sublime transcends geographical, chronological, and cultural barriers, causing an impressive alpine glacier photographed in the 19th century to move us as much as a wall of foliage rising up in the world' s most lush forests.

To illustrate this relationship between man and nature, the works in the Royal Collections have played a fundamental role. As the initial weavers of the common thread of landscape photography that has survived to the present day, they take us through jungles, deserts, mountains, and lakes. We thus embark on a journey from the former Spanish possessions in the region of Guinea and the Philippines - which nourish the historical narrative of Spain and constitute an important visual record - to the majestic European scenery, with the Spanish Picos de Europa or the Alpine mountains, whose spectacular views are witness to the challenge of capturing the most grandiose but also the most picturesque nature.

In this way, landscape photography is not only an approach to the sublime, through which to delve into our essence and our relationship with nature, but also an important historical document to explore the milestones and vicissitudes of our history, and even the traditions, beliefs, and desires of those who came before us.