So I took a trip down to London this week to check out the Sebastiao Salgado 'Genesis' exhibition before the party ended. It really was quite stunning. Gorgeous black and white prints showed Salgado's true technical mastery, but it was the unknown places that really gripped the interest. There were volcanoes and forests straight out of Lord of the Rings, there was an iceberg that looked like Superman's Fortress of Solitude. Then there were the small tribes living hidden throughout these inhospitable places, who have adapted and through sheer inaccessibility remained unchanged all these years. Despite the beauty of the landscapes and the portraits there's a melancholy about the project. Salgado clearly fears that a great number of these wonderful sights and peoples may soon only be found in the history books... and it is a valid fear. Still the emotion I took away was one of wonder and I feel that some of his photographs of the nomadic Nenet tribe exisiting with their herds on the desolate yet beautiful Siberian Arctic wastes will linger in my memory for a long time.

The book is available to buy in most good bookshops and there's an amazing cloth bound limited addition available on line that is utterly huge and a mere £2,500. It's actually worth it.

There's lots of Salgado imagery on the internet so I won't post any more of his work here. But upon exiting this magical trip around the world I suddenly remembered that I was in the Natural History Museum and so...

DINOSAURS! ROARGH!

(Frankly, you can't fight Salgado on his own territory of producing jaw-dropping studies of humanity and the natural world, so I figured the chances of him having photographed dinosaurs was pretty low - and as everyone knows dinosaurs are > than anything else, including seven year long global photo projects, so I photographed some to prove that I AM the better photographer. Ha, take that multi-award winning Salgado!)