A tree planted, a deep-rooted memory

For Sebastião Salgado, planting a tree is not a simple act, it's an act of faith and resilience. He, who has brought a forest back to life in Brazil, knows better than anyone that nature is a survivor, as long as it is given a helping hand.

In 1998, after a period of self-doubt, he and his wife Lélia founded theInstituto Terra with a wild dream: to revive the Rio Doce valley in the Amazon, deserted after decades of intensive deforestation. Twenty-five years later, three million trees have been planted, 2,000 water sources restored and a biodiversity thought to have disappeared has resurfaced. Where once there was nothing but dust, today you can hear birds singing and breathe again.

Today, in Normandy, thousands of kilometers from this Brazilian land, an apple tree, the region's emblematic tree, is rooted like a link between his work and our region.

The exhibition Sebastião Salgado, collection de la MEPpresented at Les Franciscaines, is not just a retrospective. It's an immersion in the gaze of a man who has turned his lens into a weapon of memory, a light projected onto a world in peril. His images are not just something to look at: they are something to experience, to feel, and to act upon.