Sebastião Salgado. Kuwait. A Desert on Fire

Sebastião Salgado. Kuwait. A Desert on Fire

<strong>Desert aflame</strong><br /> Sebastião Salgado documents the torched Kuwaiti oil wells<br /><br /> In January and February 1991, as the United States-led coalition drove Iraqi forces out of <strong>Kuwait</strong>, Saddam Hussein’s troops retaliated with an inferno. At some <strong>700 oil wells</strong> and an unspecified number of oil-filled low-lying areas they ignited <strong>vast, raging fires</strong>, sending billowing black clouds over the region and thousands of tons of nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.<br /><br /> As the desperate efforts to contain and extinguish the conflagration progressed, <strong>Sebastião Salgado</strong> traveled to Kuwait to witness the crisis firsthand. The conditions were excruciating. The <strong>heat was so vicious that Salgado’s smallest lens warped</strong>. 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 envrionmental impact, Salgado captured the <strong>terrifying scale of this “huge theater the size of the planet”</strong>: 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.<br /><br /> Salgado’s epic pictures first appeared in the <em>New York Times Magazine</em> in June 1991 and were subsequently widely published and awarded the <strong>Oskar Barnack Award</strong>, recognizing outstanding images on the relationship between man and the environment. <em>Kuwait: A Desert on Fire</em> is the <strong>first monograph of this astonishing series</strong>. Like <em>Genesis, Exodus,</em> and <em>The Children,</em> it is as much a major document of modern history as an extraordinary body of photographic work. <br /><br />Text in English, French, and German