Aqua Mater: a photo exhibition by Sebastião Salgado that blends water and art

Sebastião Salgado's photos take the visitor on a breathtaking and often moving world tour of water. The scenes depicted range from a glacier in Patagonia to an indigenous community sailing on the river in the Amazon, from women fishing for shrimp in Indonesia to zebras drinking from a watering hole in Namibia.

The exhibition has been organized by the Fonds de Dotation Contemplation, a French non-governmental organization, with partners that include UNESCO. 'The organizers of the exhibition approached us', explains UNESCO programme specialist Alice Aureli, because 'UNESCO was responsible for this year's celebration of World Water Day, on 22 March', the theme of which is groundwater. The Director-General of UNESCO, Audrey Azoulay, launched this year's World Water Development Report: Groundwater: Making the Invisible Visible, on behalf of UN-Water at the World Water Forum in Dakar, Senegal, on 21 March. She also led a UNESCO delegation to the exhibition opening in Paris on 31 March.

An exhibition panel provided by UNESCO's Intergovernmental Hydrological Programme explains why groundwater is so important. 'The largest reserves of freshwater in its liquid form on the planet are underground', it states. 'Half of the world's population depends on it for their supply of drinking water. These reserves also provide much of the water used for food production and industrial processes. Groundwater is also essential for the proper functioning of ecosystems, including wetlands and rivers. While in the most arid areas of the planet, groundwater is sometimes the only available water source. Finally, groundwater can play an important role in adapting to climate change'.