Sebastião Salgado: Photographer with an internationalist perspective

["Richard Fidler" <rfidler@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Of human grandeur

An economics PhD with a camera: Sebastião Salgado stands revealed in a
retrospective of his epic work as as one of the most thoughtful, and
committed photographers of our time

Amanda Hopkinson
Saturday July 27, 2002
The Guardian

Sebastião Salgado's photographs have been likened to medieval frescoes -
epics of our times. He was born in 1944, the son of a Portuguese Brazilian
and a Ukrainian Jew, and spent the first 15 years of his life in a modest
village with his five sisters. (His one brother died in infancy, and is
buried in the green graveyard close to their home.) A young Marxist, Salgado
studied economics and took a masters degree at São Paulo university,
attempting to make sense of the chaotic system of land distribution in his
home country - a preoccupation reflected in his later work as a
photographer.

As with all Brazilians from the interior, Salgado carries a sense - a
memory, perhaps - of the massive landscapes, wide horizons, forests, rivers
and mountains in grand panoramas. "It is what informs all that I see and the
work that I do," he says. Within these landscapes, the early Portuguese
settlers left a legacy of flamboyant baroque architecture, intricately
carved church facades, convents and monasteries of impressive power. The
scale of this combination of wild nature and elaborate culture has left
Salgado unintimidated by the gigantic themes he tackles.

In the wake of the 1964 military coup in Brazil, he left for Paris with his
wife, Lelia Wanick, a newly qualified architect . After completing an
economics PhD at the Sorbonne, he began working for an international coffee
consortium. Then, as he tells it, "in 1970, Lelia bought a camera. Four days
later, I borrowed it. Two weeks later, I bought my own. Within a month, I'd
built a darkroom."

The first picture he shot was a portrait of Lelia, perched on their
windowsill in an unfashionable quarter of Paris. The next series were taken
when he was on the road in central Africa, visiting tea and coffee planters.
It was a short step from there to deciding that "photography was giving me a
hundred times more interest than the rest of my work. It immediately became
my inspiration and my obsession."

Salgado's worldview and social conscience were formed early and have stayed
with him. "I'm from the third world; I belong on that side of the fence. I
am not angry, but I am emotional. We have a lot of work still to do." He
began working for the World Council of Churches, for non-governmental
organisations and aid agencies, at the same time accepting commissions from
magazines and newspapers. North American and European galleries have staged
major exhibitions of his work, which has been reproduced on posters intended
for churches, trades halls and community centres, anywhere where people can
see them and, in so doing, see something of themselves.

Salgado winces when asked if he considers himself "an artist"; he is, he
says, "a reporter". From the outset, his remit has been nothing less than
the documentation of the human condition. As one colleague from the Magnum
picture agency, of which he was a member for many years, recalls: "Salgado
was the Victor Hugo de nos jours. He was prepared to go over the top and
jusqu'au bout - to the limits of the earth and the depths of the soul."

For an Anglo-Saxon audience, this is all a bit overblown: economists and
reporters are supposed to know their place and limit themselves to specific
fields, preferably those that they have been paid to investigate. Few
photographers plan a career with the meticulousness of an economist - "Five
to seven years a project allows me a half-dozen major reportages before I
have to think about retiring," he told me in London in 1990 - while also
talking in terms of "the drama of humanity" and "the grandeur of the human
race".

In the 1980s, the decade when we discovered sub-Saharan famine, courtesy of
Bob Geldof and Band Aid, Salgado protested that "wealth" is a term too
narrowly defined, as if those who lacked a stake in world capitalism have no
inherent "wealth", or even worth. Meeting accusations that he was
"aestheticising poverty and deprivation" through his work with Médécins sans
Frontières in Somalia, he protested that the people he photographed, far
from being objects of pity, were inherently graceful and exceptionally
civilised in their relations with others. "I belong inside the phenomenon I
am documenting. It's not my intention to give people guilty consciences,
just to make them think."

In Workers, he set out to document a dying industrial age, but rapidly came
up against the brutal march of globalisation. Initially, he intended to
cover only 10 stories - stories of workers who were rapidly being superseded
by the supposedly white-collar post-industrial era, or, as Salgado puts it,
"miners being replaced by people dressed up as miners by the tourist
authorities". After eight years, Workers covered nigh-on 30 stories, from
regions as diverse as Rajasthan, Réunion and Rwanda, and included examples
from across the "developed" world, including the Channel Tunnel builders.
"We've lost the ability to see some parts of the society around us," he
said. "We always just look for the most modern."

Children suggested itself as a theme when Salgado was visiting a camp for
some of the 350,000 displaced war orphans of Mozambique. Salgado proposed
taking a portrait of each child, which they would be able to keep. The
solemnity with which they undertook the deal is witnessed in his pictures,
and the project was extended to embrace children from Croatia, Kurdistan,
Angola, Afghanistan, Sudan and Zaire. The emotion, mingling lyricism with a
sense of outrage, is in the portraits and in Salgado's text: "In Hong Kong,
prisons held some 250,000 illegal immigrants from Vietnam; an astonishing
40% of these inmates were children who had been born there and had never
seen a flower in their lives."

Terra was a project that took Salgado back to his homeland. In 1986, he
found the garimpeiros - poor prospectors who slung their rope ladders up the
muddied sides of open-cast goldmines where they scavenged and fought for
nuggets. Some critics saw the resulting images as something straight out of
Cecil B DeMille - a film set, too majestic, too melodramatic - but Salgado
knew what he was looking at: "Not since the building of pyramids by
thousands of slaves, or the Klondike gold rush in Alaska, has such an
epic-scale human drama been witnessed: 50,000 mud-soaked men digging for
gold at Serra Pelada in Para."

As Cartier-Bresson has pointed out, these photographs are among the
"patterned" ones: vast in scale, crammed with activity, little in close-up,
if you turn them upside down you get a sense of the symmetry in their
composition. It is left to the few close-ups - for example, of the
confrontation between the armed guard and the rebelliously resentful
garimpeiro - for a characteristic intensity of an encounter to emerge.

In 1996, Salgado again returned to Brazil, this time accompanying a group of
landless peasants - quite possibly relatives of the gold boom garimpeiros he
had photographed 10 years previously - on a demonstration for access to
farmland that had been theirs by title for the previous 50 years. At the
day's end, 19 lay dead and another 57 were severely wounded, after the
incursion of 155 armed police. (Six years on, in June this year, over 100
police officers were finally brought to court; only two were convicted of
any wrongdoing, and the rest acquitted.)

The hundred images in Terra show the misery that drove these people to
become part of the considerable political force that is now the Movimento
Sem Terra (MST, or Landless Movement); they also show something else - that
Salgado comes down on the side of the protesters. The final shot of the
Terra series shows the vanguard of 12,000 marchers breaking open the padlock
and entering a vast estate owned by an absentee landlord. Salgado has scaled
the fence and entered ahead of them, and is there to show the moment of
their arrival, banners and farm implements held high in a mixture of triumph
and trepidation.

Land has become a personal issue for Salgado who, at Lelia's suggestion, has
begun a reforestation programme at his father's old ranch. Here, a
generation earlier, 600 cattle had grazed; by the 1990s the land had become
so wasted it could support only a tenth of that number. The strip of land
had originally formed part of the Atlantic Forest, 97% of which had been
destroyed to make way for heavy industry. Through the reintroduction of
native hardwoods, the land is gradually recovering, and the river is
beginning to flow once more. An "Instituto Terra" has been set up to offer
advice and short courses in ecologically sympathetic farming to all comers.

Too many of the countries we thought might be "saved" in the 1970s and
1980s, Salgado says, have suffered still worse ravages of war and famine.
Better to look to specific, more small-scale projects, such as the
successful campaign to eradicate polio he has recently documented for
Unesco - or the programme beginning at the Bulcao ranch, where Salgado is
optimistic that "in 30 years, we may yet have 20% of the Atlantic Forest
restored". He is not quite ready to retire to the country, however. "I am,
and always will be, a photographer. It is my passion as well as my
profession."

His work remains remarkably consistent: there is still the grand panorama,
the dignity of labour and the pride in humanity, the use of a split horizon
to exaggerate scale. The preference for black-and-white is common to many
Latin American photographers, for the greater refinement and abstraction
that it offers. Salgado concludes that it is "the density of the light that
matters most". "Colour makes me uncomfortable: black-and-white allows for
more imagination. I dream that way, and I see the world in monochrome. It is
compassion and dignity, not colour, that allow you to see the world anew."

An exhibition, Sebastião Salgado: 25 Years Of Photography, is at Gallery 32,
32 Green Street, London W1, 020-7399 9247, from September 5-October 5.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002


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