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# The Beauty and the Distance
- URL: https://abagofstories.com/the-beauty-and-the-distance/
- Published: 2026-07-31T08:13:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-18T12:35:49.000Z
- Description: Walking through Sebastião Salgado’s Amazônia, I entered as an admirer. I left still moved by its beauty, but carrying a harder question: when photography makes us care through wonder, what might that same beauty leave outside the frame?
- Author: Giulia Zhang
- Tags: The Ethics of Looking, Field Notes, Brazil

For years, I knew Sebastião Salgado through books.I knew the density of his blacks, the almost mineral quality of his light, the small human figures moving through immense landscapes; I knew photographs that I had returned to so many times that some of them had become part of the visual vocabulary through which I understood photography itself. 

**Salgado was one of the photographers who made me want to become a photographer.** A book, however, keeps an image within the dimensions of your hands. A museum does something different. At MAXXI in Rome, *Amazônia* surrounds you.

Curated by Lélia Wanick Salgado, the exhibition brings together more than two hundred photographs of the Brazilian Amazon, moving between forest, rivers, mountains and the Indigenous peoples who live there. The installation itself is part of the experience: images appear at different heights and in different formats, while a soundscape created by Jean-Michel Jarre draws on the sounds of the forest: trees, birds, animals and water. It is difficult to remain outside it.

The sound alters the silence of the museum; photographs that seemed familiar on a printed page acquire another physical weight when they rise above you. Looking at them, my imagination supplied what the gallery could not contain: smoke, fish, wet vegetation, river water, the particular heaviness of air in a forest.

For someone who had admired Salgado for years, there was also something intimate about finally standing in front of the prints themselves. I expected to be impressed. **I was.** But admiration, I discovered, does not necessarily make looking easier. Sometimes it makes looking more difficult.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/08/salgado-0019.jpg)

## The power of being seduced

Salgado knows how to make scale visible. Clouds build above the forest like architecture. Rivers become systems of light. Mountains appear and disappear through mist. Trees repeat until distance becomes almost impossible to measure. His black and white does not simply remove color; it reorganizes the world into light, shadow, surface and volume.

**The effect can be overwhelming.** This is one of the reasons Salgado has been admired for decades, and also one of the reasons he has been criticized. His photographs are extraordinarily beautiful, including when they deal with lives, environments and histories marked by violence or inequality. 

For some critics, that beauty risks becoming a filter: the image can be so formally complete that the circumstances that produced it begin to recede. Standing inside *Amazônia*, I understood the criticism better than I had before. I also understood why I could not fully accept it.

**Beauty is not automatically the enemy of truth**. A photograph does not become ethically stronger simply because it is ugly, nor does suffering become more honest when photographed badly. Beauty can hold attention; it can make us stop in front of something we might otherwise pass by. It can create attachment before knowledge has had time to arrive.

Salgado's landscapes do precisely that. **They make indifference difficult.** The stated intention of *Amazônia* is to show what still exists and what is at risk of disappearing; the exhibition asks the visitor to encounter the forest not simply as scenery, but as a living system whose survival is inseparable from the lives of the people who inhabit it.

I understand that decision. I am moved by it. And yet, as I continued through the exhibition, another question began to follow me.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/08/salgado-0003.jpg)

## Where is the destruction?

The threat is everywhere in *Amazônia*. It is in the texts, in the testimonies, in the information about deforestation and pressure on Indigenous territories; it is part of the reason the exhibition exists at all. But I found it much less directly in the photographs themselves.

What Salgado gives us, overwhelmingly, **is what remains**: abundance, scale, bodies, water, trees, mountains, communities, an environment still capable of appearing immense enough to resist us.

At first this seems entirely coherent. If you want someone to defend a place, perhaps you must first give them a reason to love it. But there is a consequence. The catastrophe remains largely outside the image.

I began wondering what happens when photography chooses to defend something principally by showing its beauty. **Does wonder produce responsibility?** Or can it also reassure us? Can the image of an apparently boundless forest make it harder to understand precisely how vulnerable that forest has become? There is no simple answer, and perhaps there should not be.

**What interested me was the discomfort itself.** I had entered the exhibition expecting Salgado's photographs to answer questions. Instead, they were beginning to create them.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/08/salgado-0015.jpg)

## And then there are the people

The exhibition is organized broadly between the Amazonian landscape and the Indigenous peoples Salgado encountered during his journeys. Here my attention changed.

The landscapes had made me look outward, toward scale. The portraits asked for another kind of attention: faces, bodies, gestures, ornament, expressions, the small information carried by the way someone stands or looks back at the person holding the camera.

These photographs contain enormous dignity and presence. **Nothing in them asks for pity.** That matters. Photography of Indigenous peoples has a long and deeply compromised history. 

The camera has often accompanied conquest, anthropology, tourism and the desire to classify human difference; people have been photographed as specimens, curiosities, survivors of an imagined past, evidence of a world supposedly outside modernity. Even images made with admiration can repeat some of those habits if the person in front of the lens becomes primarily a sign of otherness.

I do not think that is what Salgado is trying to do. His photographs communicate attention and, often, a profound respect for the people he photographs. I felt that strongly. **But respect does not remove every question.**

Some of the portraits isolate their subjects against dark backgrounds. Formally, the effect is extraordinary: bodies and faces emerge with almost sculptural force. Nothing distracts us from them.

And yet I found myself wondering about precisely what had disappeared. The forest. The house. The river. **The community.** The ordinary objects through which life becomes specific.

I had spent much of the exhibition being told, visually and conceptually, that these people's lives cannot be separated from the territories they inhabit; then, in some of the portraits, photography performs that separation for us.

Perhaps the black background allows us to look more closely at a person. Perhaps it gives that person a visual monumentality usually reserved for political leaders, celebrities or figures in classical portraiture. I can see that interpretation, and I can see its power. But I could also feel the loss of context. **A person is never only a face.**

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/08/salgado-0002.jpg)

## The distance inside closeness

This may be the contradiction at the heart of documentary photography. We travel because we want to come closer. We spend time with people, listen, eat, wait, walk, learn names and gestures; eventually we lift a camera because we want to carry something of that encounter elsewhere.

**But the photograph always removes.** It chooses one fraction of a second rather than another, one edge of the world rather than what lies beyond it. It separates a person from what happened immediately before and immediately after. Even the most generous photograph creates a boundary.

The problem is not that photography does this. Photography cannot avoid doing it. The question is whether we remain conscious of what has been removed.

Looking at Salgado's Indigenous portraits, I felt both intimacy and distance at the same time. I could study a face with an attention that everyday life rarely allows; yet I also knew how little I understood about the person looking back at me.

That realization changed something in the sentence I had instinctively wanted to use when I entered the exhibition: ***they are us and we are them.***

I still understand the feeling behind those words. Human emotions cross languages and borders; affection, fear, humor, grief, tenderness and pride do not belong to one culture. But perhaps recognition should not depend on similarity.

The people in these photographs do not need to resemble me in order to deserve my attention. Their cultures do not need to become familiar before their rights matter. Difference does not have to be translated into sameness before dignity becomes visible.

Maybe photography's task is more difficult than telling us that everyone is like us. Maybe it has to teach us **how to remain present** before someone who is not.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/6d/20/6d207f2a-6719-4291-87ae-b3b4a25be7f5/content/images/2026/08/salgado-0014.jpg)

## What beauty can do

I left *Amazônia* still admiring Sebastião Salgado. That matters to say. Questioning these photographs did not diminish them for me; it changed the nature of my attention. 

The landscapes remained magnificent. **The portraits remained in my memory.** The exhibition still made the Amazon feel less abstract than it had when I entered. But something else remained as well.

I had always understood photographic beauty largely as a strength: the ability to stop someone, to create attention, to make an image survive among thousands of other images.

After *Amazônia*, I began to understand that **beauty also carries responsibility**. A beautiful photograph can reveal, but it can also simplify. It can create empathy, but it can also create distance. It can persuade us to protect what it shows while quietly removing whatever does not fit within its visual language. None of this means we should distrust beauty. It means we should keep looking after beauty has done its work.

We should ask what lies beyond the edge of the photograph; who has been given space to speak, who has become a symbol, what history accompanies the face in front of us, and what disappears when the photographer makes an image complete.

Perhaps that is one of the most valuable things a great photographer can give another photographer. Not a style to copy. **A question that remains.**

I entered *Amazônia* wanting to see the photographs of someone who had helped me choose photography. I left still grateful for them, but less interested in learning how to photograph like Sebastião Salgado.

I wanted to understand more carefully what happens when I point my own camera at someone else. And that question followed me outside the museum.

---

*Originally published by Ayzoh! in 2023\. Revised and expanded for A Bag of Stories in 2026.*