“The Photographs I Love” 7 – Salgado

“Today more than ever, I feel that mankind is one.
There are differences in color, language, culture and opportunity, but the feelings and reactions of all people are similar.”
(Sebastião Salgado)

Sebastião Salgado. “Serra Pelada”, Brazil, 1986

The next choice, among the photos I love, is by Sebastião Salgado, the photographer born in Brazil, in the state of Minas Gerais, in 1944.

He has been living in Paris for some time now, but it is certainly not mistaken if he is called a “citizen of the world” given how many kilometers he has traveled in life.

To think that his studies and initial profession was an economist.

Sebastião and Léila Salgado

His first work, which imprinted his career, was on drought in the Sahel, Africa, in 1970.

As he often repeats, it was a place that he never or will never abandon:

“The first place to photograph is still Africa, I love its skies, deserts, mountains, everything is huge and, every time I arrive, I feel that I am at home.”

It is Africa that calls him, and convinces him to quit his job as an economist in London. Africa is where many Brazilians come from, and it was the primitive continent millions of years ago, for each of us.

 

After having been in the Magnum agency since 1979, he left it in 1994 to found his own agency, with which he also finances his long projects: Amazonas Images.

 

The word “huge” is not a coincidence in Salgado.

I think it suits him well.

His photo books are among the mammoth and heaviest in my library, truly a photographer weighed by the kilo.

After all, his reportages last for years, collecting thousands of photographs, always with an eye – as a former economist – in 35mm on the environmental, political and economic changes that affect the life of the human being, with particular attention to the weaker groups. .

From one of his first projects: “Other Americas”, the result of 6 years in Latin America to document the life of the countryside.

 

After this Salgado begins to work on one of his monumental masterpieces: “Workers” published in 1993, 400 pages of photographs, 6 years of work around 16 countries to tell the relationship between men and the work.

And “Exodus”, another huge project, again for 6 years with migrants, visiting over 35 countries to document their movements.

“La Churchgate Railways Station”. Bombay, India, 1995

Up to his latest work, that “Genesis”, released in 2013, which wants to be a cure for too much pain he has seen in his life, a reconciliation with Mother Earth. Traveling for 7 years, from 2004 to 2011, 30 expeditions to every corner of the earth, in search of uncontaminated nature, prior to the “pain” that society inflicts on man.

As he explains in his interview with Mario Calabresi:

“Before my eyes people were dying of cholera, diarrhea, all kinds of diseases, the violence of the refugee camps. At the end of this journey I was sick, my health was in pieces. I went to many doctors, until one told me: 'The problem is that you have too much death inside'.”

 

It will be the uncontaminated nature and the peoples who still live in it, closely linked to the land, that makes it breathe:

“I have not lost hope because the thing that has made us superior so far is not technology but instinct, not bureaucracy but spirituality, there is something greater within us.”

 

But the photograph I have chosen is far from any kind of hope and spirituality.

Rather, it's an open window on hell, as if Dürer could have photographed Dante Alighieri's infernal circles instead of engraving.

The famous, unfortunately, gold mine of Serra Pelada, a Brazilian village in the southeast of Parà, 400 kilometers south of the mouth of the Amazon, photographed in 1986, precisely for the “Workers” project.

“Serra Pelada”, Brazil, 1986

In the 17th and 18th centuries, a great deal of gold was found in Brazil. In 1979 gold nuggets began to come to light from the earth and rivers, sparking a gold rush, with thousands of people, including poor farmers and adventurers, armed with pickaxes, who began to dig an open pit mine: a chasm 120 meters deep and 300 wide.

In the period of greatest exploitation in the mine worked about 100,000 diggers, called “garimpeiros” (climbers).

 

Salgado's photography is terrible and sublime, like certain paintings of Gothic Romanticism. No longer human beings but thousands of bodies in regular motion: each miner on his personal “pit” of two meters by 3, and then the desperate people called “formigas” (ants), slaves whose job was to climb ropes 400 meters long to bring bags weighing 30-50 kilos to the surface.

Salgado writes this when he saw the mine for the first time:

“All the hair on my body was straight. The pyramids, the history of mankind revealed itself. I had traveled until the dawn of time. […] 50,000 men sculpted by mud and dreams. All that can be heard are murmurs and silent screams, the scratching of shovels guided by human hands, not a hint of machinery. It is the sound of gold echoing in the soul of its pursuers.”

 

“Serra Pelada”, Brazil, 1986

If almost all the photographs I have previously chosen are like microscopes aimed at the human soul and its narration, in this photograph the multitude opens up to us, as if the eye struggled to keep everything within limits, and humanity escaped from the edges of the photo.

It's only thanks to Salgado's mastery in composing hell in form and colors, with its superb blacks and whites, that we are able to conceive the inconceivable.

It's therefore understandable, as after this type of images, Salgado will photograph the same type of multitude, but no longer men, but penguins. Not suffering but the beauty of nature.

 

To try to cure all that “death inside”.

Macaroni Penguins on Zavadovski Island. The Sandwich Islands, 2009

On his latest project, and in general on his vision, a beautiful documentary film was made by Wim Wenders in 2014: “The Salt of the Earth”. Don't miss it.

 

READ ALSO:

• "The Photographs I Love" – Series 
• Unity of Opposites: "My Bangladesh" Photo Series (5) 

Salgado: “Other Americas” (Contrasto, 2016)
Salgado: “Criancas – Ninos – Bambini” (Taschen, 2016)
Salgado: “Workers” (Contrasto, 2001)
Salgado: “Exodus” (Taschen, 2016)
Salgado: “Genesi” (Taschen, 2013)
Salgado: “Profumo di sogno” (Contrasto, 2015)
Mario Calabresi: “Ad occhi aperti” (Contrasto, 2013) 

The Salt of the Earth - Official Trailer

Salt of the Earth full documentary movie

Italian version