It is the culmination of an eight-year, globetrotting project that Paris-based, Brazilian-born lensman Sebastião Salgado describes as “my love letter to the planet.” Genesis, a photography book published by Taschen, is filled with hundreds of black-and-white images of landscapes, wildlife, and indigenous peoples shot over the course of more than 30 trips to the far corners of the earth. Reminding us that our humanity is inextricably linked to the natural world, Salgado’s work is a passionate, breathtakingly beautiful call to action. “Some 46 percent of the planet is still as it was in the time of Genesis,” he explains. “We must preserve what exists.” Until July 27, 245 of his Genesis images are on show at the National Museum of Singapore, marking the first time the photographs have been exhibited in Asia. Curating the event is his wife Lélia Wanick Salgado, who has arranged the prints geographically, taking viewers from remote, relatively untouched islands like the Galapagos and the iceberg-studded seas of Antarctic, to the jungles of Amazonia, the deserts and tribal lands of Africa, and the untamed wilderness of the Arctic Circle. –Gabrielle Lipton

This article originally appeared in the June/July 2014 print issue of DestinAsian magazine (“Epic Earth”).