Sebastião Salgado has worked in Africa since the beginning of his career. His first report in Niger took place in the 1970s, during which he covered the independence wars in Angola, Mozambique, and Spanish Sahara. Since then, he has photographed the disasters that have befallen Africa's populations, including the drought in Ethiopia, Sudan, and Chad, the genocide in Rwanda, and thousands of refugees crammed into makeshift camps, starving or dying of thirst on the streets, or succumbing to epidemics. He also captured images of Africans engaged in agriculture and fishing, portraying those who returned to their homeland after long years of exile.

More recently, Sebastião Salgado has returned to Africa to capture the pride and beauty of the continent in images: the dunes and the Himba people in Namibia, the Dinka in southern Sudan, the mountain-dwelling gorillas, and the Virunga region with its volcanoes in Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Uganda. These photographs are part of the ongoing project Genesis – a series of black-and-white photographs of landscapes, fauna, flora, and human communities. This work is designed as an exploration of nature in its pristine state.