Archives des Sebastião Salgado

A Detour Worth Taking

A detour to the TASCHEN store in Berlin’s Charlottenburg district brought us into a world of art, photography, and beautifully illustrated books. From its striking geometric floors to its carefully arranged displays, the store invited us to slow down, explore, and follow our curiosity—a fitting expression of its welcoming motto, “Books for Optimists.”

When we visited Berlin, we made a point of taking a detour to the TASCHEN store. In a city with so many museums, monuments, and neighbourhoods to explore, a bookshop might seem like a modest addition to the itinerary. For us, it belonged there. Books are part of how we discover places, connect ideas, and extend the pleasure of travelling. As TASCHEN affiliates, we also had a particular reason to visit. We wanted to discover the publisher beyond its website, surrounded by its books.

Outside, a blue pavement sign offered a simple invitation: “Books for Optimists.” Against the pale façade, beneath the TASCHEN lettering and dark awnings, those words made an appealing introduction. There is something optimistic about entering a bookshop, after all. You go in expecting that someone else’s work might open a door, introduce an unfamiliar subject, or give shape to an interest you have not yet explored. It was a fitting message for a visit driven by curiosity, with no particular title we needed to find.

Located on Schlüterstraße, in Charlottenburg, the store gave our itinerary another destination beyond Berlin’s major landmarks. Once inside, the visual richness extended well beyond the covers. Warm wooden shelving lined the walls, while long tables and low display units presented books face up, inviting a closer look. White walls provided space for photographs and framed illustrations. Beneath everything, blue-and-white geometric tiles gave the rooms a distinctive rhythm. Depending on the pattern, the floor seemed to shift between stars, triangles, and interlocking shapes.

Designed in collaboration with the Milanese duo Stampanoni and Licitra, the store extends across five rooms and features Gio Ponti tiles. Yet the architectural details never seemed detached from the books. The shelving, display surfaces, and wall arrangements brought different formats into view without making everything compete for attention. Some books stood upright like individual exhibits; others lay in stacks or rested open on stands. The result suggested a bookshop with something of a gallery’s approach to presentation, while keeping the publications at the centre of the experience.

Photography was particularly prominent. The names David Bailey and Annie Leibovitz appeared above displays where large books lay open beneath framed images. Elsewhere, Sebastião Salgado’s Amazônia had its own presentation, with black-and-white photographs arranged above a reading stand. These displays made the relationship between a photograph on a wall and an image reproduced in a book especially clear. Each format offers a different encounter. One holds your attention from a distance; the other draws you towards a sequence, a page, and the possibility of looking further.

The range of subjects also emerged through the contrasts between displays. A colourful Pucci volume shared a shelf with a sculptural figure and packaging bearing the name Tom of Finland. A Norman Foster presentation introduced architecture, while another area carried Gio Ponti’s name above framed works and a small seating arrangement. These changes of subject gave the rooms their own points of interest. Moving through them meant moving between creative disciplines, with the design of the store providing continuity.

Elsewhere, shelves and tables brought together cinema, music, sport, travel, and art. A bright yellow Lakers cover stood out among the publications, while another section gathered books devoted to cities and destinations. That breadth speaks to our own interests. On our blog, a musical discovery can sit alongside a museum visit, a travel experience, or a reflection on a book. We enjoy following those connections. A photograph can make us curious about a city; a film can lead us towards an artist; an artist can change how we look at an ordinary street.

The oversized books were another reminder of what a screen cannot fully communicate. Seeing an illustrated volume open across a generous spread gives its scale a practical meaning. The image has room to unfold, and the composition becomes part of the encounter. One particularly colourful open book captured that sense of abundance. It sat in a red case, with ribbon markers spilling over its edge. It also illustrated why these publications reward an unhurried approach: sometimes a single spread contains enough detail to occupy your attention before you even think about turning the page.

Our affiliation with TASCHEN is worth mentioning openly: purchases made through affiliate links on our blog may earn us a commission. Visiting the store gave that connection a more tangible context. It offered an opportunity to consider how these books are presented and how their subjects relate to what we share with readers. Beyond any individual recommendation, the visit reinforced the pleasure of encountering books without needing to make an immediate decision. A title can remain in your mind as a possibility, waiting for the right moment.

Looking back, we are glad we made the detour. Between the pavement sign, the patterned floors, the photographic displays, and the shelves full of competing invitations, the store offered plenty to discover. Berlin’s museums and monuments gave us encounters with history and art on a grand scale. This visit added something more intimate: time spent among books, following our interests from one room to the next. “Books for Optimists” felt like an appropriate thought to take away. There is always another subject to explore, another image to examine, and another reason to remain curious.

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Echoes of Civilizations and Forests at Mexico’s National Museum of Anthropology

The National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City offers an immersive exploration of Mesoamerican heritage through its architectural design and extensive collections. The exhibits emphasize the continuity of indigenous cultures, while its innovative presentations provoke reflection on Mexican identity and history.

Date of Visit: March 21, 2025

Visiting the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City was not merely an excursion into a collection of artifacts; it was an immersion into the complexity and continuity of human history in Mesoamerica. Located within the vast green space of Chapultepec Park, the museum stands as one of the most important institutions of its kind in the world. From the moment we entered its monumental courtyard, dominated by the iconic umbrella-shaped fountain supported by a single column, we understood that this museum was designed not simply to display objects but to provoke reflection on the very foundations of Mexican identity. The architectural symbolism of the fountain, with cascading water recalling life, fertility, and myth, set the tone for what would become a journey across time, memory, and culture.

The history of the museum itself enriches this experience. Long before its modern construction in the 1960s, attempts to collect and study Mexico’s pre-Hispanic past had already begun. In the eighteenth century, Lorenzo Boturini, an Italian scholar, gathered manuscripts and artifacts in an effort to write the history of indigenous peoples, though his collections were later confiscated and absorbed into national holdings. By 1823, under the presidency of Guadalupe Victoria, the Museo Nacional was officially established, making it one of the earliest national museums in the Americas. Over the decades, the institution evolved, changing names and focus until it became the Museo Nacional de Antropología in 1939. Its move to the present site in Chapultepec in 1964, under architect Pedro Ramírez Vázquez, marked the birth of the museum as we know it today, completed in just nineteen months and inaugurated by President Adolfo López Mateos.

The architecture of the museum itself reinforces this vision. Conceived as an homage to Mexico’s indigenous heritage, the building combines modernist clarity with symbolic resonance. The most iconic feature is the Paraguas, the monumental umbrella-like pillar at the heart of the courtyard. Designed to drain water and sculpted in bronze by José and Tomás Chávez Morado, it is both functional and allegorical — a structure that creates a space neither fully covered nor uncovered. With a total area of more than 80,000 square meters, of which 44,000 are covered and 36,000 open-air, the museum is itself a vast cultural landscape, echoing the complexity of the civilizations it houses.

The archaeological collections on the ground floor embody a chronological passage through the rise and fall of the great civilizations that shaped Mesoamerica. Moving from the Olmecs, often referred to as the “mother culture” through Teotihuacan, the Maya, the Toltecs, and ultimately the Mexica or Aztecs, the arrangement of the halls conveys more than history; it reveals the dynamism of cultural evolution. Each gallery is immersive, not only presenting artifacts but also reconstructing aspects of daily life, ritual, and architecture. The effect is that civilizations are not perceived as static or extinct but as vibrant societies with enduring legacies.

Few objects capture this sense of permanence more than the Piedra del Sol, the Aztec Sun Stone. Unearthed in 1790 in Mexico City’s main square and later transferred to the museum, it remains one of its most celebrated treasures. Encountering it in person is a moment of confrontation with scale, artistry, and meaning. Carved from basalt and weighing over twenty tons, it is both monumental and intricate, an emblem of Mexica cosmology and their conception of time. Standing before it, we felt the tension between aesthetic admiration and intellectual inquiry: how such a society conceived the cycles of the universe and embedded them in stone. Equally compelling were the colossal Olmec heads, whose enigmatic expressions hint at a civilization both distant and foundational. These works are not mere archaeological finds but symbols of human imagination reaching across millennia.

The Maya galleries offered a different kind of immersion. The funerary mask of Pakal from Palenque and the recreation of his tomb reveal not only the grandeur of Maya art but also the political and spiritual sophistication of their world. The sarcophagus lid, with its intricate carvings of cosmological scenes, embodies the dialogue between rulership, divinity, and mortality. Here the museum succeeds in communicating that objects are not isolated curiosities but nodes in a vast network of meaning. By situating artifacts within reconstructed architectural contexts, it allows us to envision the monumental cities of the Maya as living centers of ceremony and power.

Ascending to the upper floor, the focus shifts from ancient civilizations to the ethnographic present. This transition is crucial, for it highlights continuity rather than rupture. The exhibits dedicated to contemporary indigenous groups underscore that Mexico’s cultural mosaic is not confined to the past but persists vibrantly today. Displays of ceremonial clothing, agricultural tools, musical instruments, and ritual objects articulate how indigenous communities maintain their traditions while navigating the pressures of modernity. For us, these galleries provided one of the most important lessons of the museum: anthropology must not fossilize culture into relics but must recognize the resilience and adaptability of living peoples.

During our visit, we also had the privilege of experiencing Amazônia, Sebastião Salgado’s photography exhibition presented within the museum. More than 200 black-and-white images, taken over six years in the Brazilian Amazon, filled the space with both grandeur and intimacy. Sweeping aerial shots of jungle canopy, intimate portraits of Indigenous communities, and thunderheads rolling over river basins formed a visual tapestry that was deeply evocative. The installation was immersive: ambient soundscapes of rainforest life heightened the atmosphere and made it impossible not to feel both awe and concern. This exhibition amplified themes we had already sensed in the museum’s permanent collection — the connection between people and landscape, the fragility of ecosystems, and the urgency of preserving both human and natural heritage. In seeing Amazônia, we were reminded that conservation is not an abstract ideal but a story lived daily by Indigenous peoples and ecosystems alike.

What distinguishes the National Museum of Anthropology is its ability to balance scholarly rigor with accessibility. Explanations are clear without being reductive, reconstructions are imaginative without slipping into spectacle, and the scale of presentation respects both the monumentality and the intimacy of the cultures represented. As we moved through the halls, we found ourselves not only learning but also questioning: how do nations preserve heritage, how do they narrate history, and how do they reconcile pride with the tragedies of conquest and colonization? These questions lingered as strongly as the visual impact of the artifacts themselves.

By the time we stepped back into Chapultepec Park, the visit had become more than a cultural outing; it was an intellectual encounter with the foundations of Mexican identity and, more broadly, with the role of museums in society. The National Museum of Anthropology does not merely preserve objects; it curates memory and projects meaning. It reminds us that civilizations rise and fall, but their ideas, symbols, and traditions continue to shape the present. As the sound of the cascading fountain echoed once more in our minds, we realized that the museum itself embodies the very continuity it celebrates — an unbroken dialogue between past and present, inviting us to reflect on who we are and how we remember.

Rating: [out of 5 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️]

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

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A Poetic Lens on a Fragile World

The Amazônia exhibition by Sebastião Salgado at Mexico City’s National Museum of Anthropology offers an immersive experience through over 200 powerful photographs. Highlighting the Amazon’s beauty and fragility, it advocates for Indigenous communities and emphasizes urgent environmental preservation amid modernity’s detachment.

Visited in March 2025.

During our recent visit to Mexico City, we had the privilege of attending Sebastião Salgado’s Amazônia exhibition at the National Museum of Anthropology. It wasn’t just a photography exhibit — it was a visceral, immersive journey into one of the last untouched places on Earth. Salgado, a Brazilian social documentary photographer and photojournalist, is known for his powerful black-and-white imagery that often captures the dignity and resilience of marginalized communities. With Amazonia, he shifts the focus to the environment itself — and the Indigenous peoples who have long served as its stewards.

The exhibition, curated in collaboration with Lélia Wanick Salgado (his wife and creative partner), combines over 200 black-and-white photographs taken over six years across the Brazilian Amazon. The images are breathtaking: sweeping aerial views of thick jungle canopies, intimate portraits of Indigenous communities, and awe-inspiring shots of thunderclouds rolling over river basins. But beyond their visual beauty lies a stark message — that the Amazon is both a wonder of nature and a fragile ecosystem under constant threat.

One of the most remarkable elements of Amazonia is how Salgado uses photography not just to document, but to advocate. He doesn’t romanticize Indigenous life; rather, he presents it with dignity and nuance. His lens invites us to see these communities not as relics of a distant past, but as vibrant societies whose knowledge and ways of life are vital to the survival of the rainforest. In doing so, he subtly critiques modernity’s detachment from nature and our role in the Amazon’s destruction.

The exhibition space at the Anthropology Museum amplified the experience. Surrounded by immersive soundscapes — composed by Jean-Michel Jarre using recordings of rainforest sounds — we felt transported. It was an emotional experience: awe, sorrow, hope, and even a sense of responsibility. One photo in particular, of a Yanomami elder gazing into the distance, stayed with us. It was not just a portrait, but a silent testimony of wisdom, endurance, and urgency.

Salgado’s background in economics adds another layer to his work. He understands global systems, and his work reflects the intersection of economy, environment, and human rights. After decades of documenting human suffering — from famine in Africa to migration crises — Salgado turned to nature with the same moral intensity. Amazonia is not a departure from his previous work, but rather its continuation. It is about preservation, about connection, and ultimately, about survival.

In an age where climate change is no longer a distant threat but a lived reality, Amazonia reminds us what is at stake. Salgado’s work is a call to action, a prayer, and a celebration — all in one.

If you have the chance to visit this exhibition, do it. And if not, seek out the catalog, the film The Salt of the Earth, or any of Salgado’s work. His photography is not just seen — it’s felt.