Sebastião Salgado: Photographic Images of a World in Distress

In a new Future of the Humanities Project event series — A Bent but Beautiful World: Literature, Art, and the Environment — we delve into the topical area of our environment. In recent years, we have rightly heard much about the world’s environmental problems, dangers, and disasters. However, in this series, we will invite speakers to explore the ways in which art and literature have foregrounded the inspirational beauty, delicacy, and strength of the natural world.

Assembled over the course of an eight-year global expedition, Brazilian photojournalist Sebastião Salgado’s Genesis (2013) project provides images of vast and remote regions where nature reigns in silent and pristine majesty. At the exhibition of Genesis in Lisbon in 2015 Léila Wanick Salgado, Sebastião Salgado’s wife and a fellow Brazilian filmmaker and environmentalist, said, “Genesis is a quest for the world as it was, as it was formed, as it evolved, as it existed for millennia before modern life accelerated and began distancing us from the very essence of our being.” But what kind of nature is in view here? In the Anthropocene epoch, can we really speak of pristine or unspoiled landscapes? Could we ever?

In this presentation, Dr. Tim Howles will reflect on and analyze Salgado’s photography of nature—and the human gaze that invariably frames it. Michael Scott, director of the Future of the Humanities Project, will provide opening and closing remarks, and Kathryn Temple and Rev. Joseph Simmons, S.J., will moderate a Q&A session following the presentation.

Online. Open to all.

 

Participants:

Tim Howles is associate director of the Laudato Si’ Research Institute, based at Campion Hall, Oxford. The institute seeks to generate cutting-edge research contributions for societal transformation on the most pressing ecological and social issues of our day. His particular interests lie at the intersection of politics and theology, with a focus on the contemporary planetary crisis. His book, The Political Theology of Bruno Latour: Globalisation, Secularisation and Environmental Crisis, will be published with Edinburgh University Press in 2023. Howles is also an ordained Anglican priest.

Kathryn Temple (moderator) is a professor in the Department of English at Georgetown University where she has taught since 1994. She specializes in the study of law and the humanities. Among her publications are Loving Justice: Legal Emotions in William Blackstone’s England (2019) and the co-edited Research Handbook on Law and Emotions (2021). Her humanities outreach activities include work with military veterans and the incarcerated.

Rev. Joseph Simmons, S.J., (moderator) is an American Catholic priest currently writing his doctoral thesis at Campion Hall, Oxford. He is exploring the Christian imagination and the fertile place where belief and unbelief touch in the fiction of Virginia Woolf and Marilynne Robinson. Simmons previously studied theology at Boston College and the Harvard Divinity School. His Licentiate in Sacred Theology thesis, “Via Literaria: Marilynne Robinson’s Theology Through a Literary Imagination,” explored the convergence of literary and Christian imaginations.

Michael Scott is senior dean, fellow of Blackfriars Hall, Oxford, college adviser for postgraduate students, and a member of the Las Casas Institute. He also serves as senior adviser to the president at Georgetown University. Scott was on the editorial board which relaunched Critical Survey from Oxford University Press. Scott previously served as the pro vice chancellor at De Montfort University and founding vice chancellor of Wrexham Glyndwr University.

 

This event is sponsored by the Future of the Humanities Project; the Georgetown Humanities Initiative; the Georgetown Master’s Program in the Engaged and Public Humanities; Campion Hall, Oxford; and the Las Casas Institute (Blackfriars Hall, Oxford). It is part of the one-year-long series: A Bent but Beautiful World: Literature, Art, and the Environment.

Contact:
Las Casas Institute with Georgetown University
lascasas@bfriars.ox.ac.uk