Sebastião Salgado. GENESIS

Buy a hardback copy, at whatever the price you can find it. The photo book is over full of Astounding images of humans around our world in last decade. The photos are Black & White and people of all ages will find it mesmerizing, educating, question raising, joyous, sad, frustrating, and hopeful. The photo artist and photo essayist author is an adventurer, husband and father. Their family also revived a dying farm homestead in Brazil, by re-greening it and letting Nature replenish it. Did I say Buy it? You'll want this, and you'll want others to see it for themselves too.

We were mesmerized by an exhibit of Salgado's photographs recently. The book includes many of the photos we saw. Although smaller in size they still inspire awe.

This is a large book, a great book, an important book, a beautiful book. Its avowed purpose is to instill a love of our planet through the medium of magnificent black and white photographs of the world's untamed places, animals, and people, as they were or may have been in the time before history. The artist, Sebastiao Salgado, is a master photographer--a master landscape photographer, a master nature photographer, a master people photographer, and a master aerial photographer. Each of the hundreds of photographs magnificently printed in this book is a masterpiece, even those few printed in smaller than full-page format. There isn't a weak image in the lot. The pictures of unfamiliar places, animals, and people are no less than awe-inspiring. The pictures of more familiar places and animals, such as Bryce Canyon and Monument Valley, and lions, penguins and apes, stand favorable comparison with the very best black and white photographs of the same subjects by other master photographers.The book's layout gives respectful white space to the images, and while there are some larger images that span double-page spreads, I somehow didn't find this as annoying as I often do.This book is also a great bargain. Go buy it!As to its purpose, the book shows us the beauty of a fragile world we humans are on a fast track to destroying, but don't expect it to raise your commitment to alleviating global warming, our world's greatest existential peril. That's too much to expect of any book of photographs in this day and age of media saturation. Hopefully, some of the book's proceeds will help Salgado and his wife in their work of restoring a small piece of the Brazilian rain forest.

Excellent book, excellent photos.But, printing the photos on both pages damages the photo in the middle section.

The media could not be loaded. Huge collection of various subjects all captured masterfully.

Salgado is probably the finest photographer in his genre working today, but this magnum opus is, by far too "magnum".* It is far too big* It is badly curated: there is a lot of great photography and a powerful message in this book, but much of the impact of the great photographs and the message is reduced because there are just too many photographs for the reader to easily digest in a single (or even a few) sitting. The really good stuff gets swamped by the lots and lots of marginal images presented in groups on fold-out pages. It is much akin to information being drowned out by to much undigested data. In reality, this could have been a much better book with no more than 30% of the included images.* Many of the best images are given two page spreads, meaning a great image is broken up across two pages (that don't even lay flat), lessening the impact of an otherwise excellent image for mere size - which, by the way, makes this book virtually impossible to hold comfortably in your lap. The really good images would have been better served if the book had been produced in a landscape format so that they could be viewed without a break. Fewer images not broken up by binding.* Other than the main chapter headings, there isn't any information about any of the images in the book, itself - that's why there is a companion book contains exhaustive and often repetitive information about every image in the main volume. Again, for me, this is where information lapsed into being data, and made this a volume that can only be comfortably navigated while sitting at a desk or table.* The physical production quality of the book is first rate, it is the design that lets the side down.

This book compiles some of the great photos of Salgado. The photos are well rendered and sized right. That means the book is large and weighs a lot but it is worth it to get the quality of his photos. I use the book to study from and write down what I love about each of his photos. So it has become my reference and guide to photography.

I have seen Sebastiao Salgado's work about migrations in walls as big as 10 x 15 feet and it was beautiful and shocking at the same time then.With his new book, Genesis, I was happily surprised in discovering a new Sebastiao Salgado: more optimistic, more hopeful and with a body of work beyond my best imagination.All his work is in black and white. Not any black and white. An AMAZING black and white collection.What an artist, and what a privilege to own his book. I look at this book for inspiration every week. I show my friends, and I talk about it.It is a very thick and heavy book, with fine art quality.I love the beautiful book that Steve McCurry has - Iconic-Photographs-Standard Edition - (it was my last year's Christmas gift!). This book is in the same level or maybe better for a fan of black and white like me.If you have any doubt about ordering or not, just do it. It is a beautiful book.