Sebastião Salgado

I was introduced to Sebastião Salgado a few weeks ago and, as any one would be, was immediately drawn to his very distinctive style, passionate approach to subject matter and his interest in nature. Salgado was born in 1944 and is from Brazil.  He originally trained as an economist and worked as one for the International Coffee Organisation.  In 2001 he was made a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador and if you look at this TED talk you will see he is an ardent supporter and promoter of ecological responsibility.

His most famous work is a series of photographs taken in Serra Palada,  Brazil in 1986 of humans which are rendered utterly ant-like by their numbers and close proximity to each-other.  The mine was notorious for its inhumane conditions, violence and horror. The miners were apparently known as 'mud hogs', a self-explanatory description of dehumanised beings working for a pittance in a kind of hell on Earth.

Salgado has travelled extensively photographing people, animals and landscapes.  His processing is consistent and whatever the subject matter his images are fairly easy to recognise as one of his.  They are high in contrast, always black and white and many of photographs focus on large numbers of either humans or animals together - herds, groups, swarms going about their activities in large seemingly overcrowded groups.  I am reminded of bees and colonies when looking at his humans - Church Gate Station, Bombay, India 1996, The Istiqlal Mosque, Jakarata, Indonesia 1996, and images from the Brazilian mine for instance all portray human beings in the same way as wildebeest, penguins and large-horned cattle.  When I look at these photographs I am reminded that we humans, so arrogant in our supposed superiority are in many ways no different to fruit flies although we have every opportunity to make our lives more meaningful - and choose not to.  At any rate, the message from Salgado's work is that the ones in power choose to make the lives of those not in power less meaningful, perhaps even meaningless.

When I first started looking at Salgado's work I was reading The Bang Bang Club, a book about photo-journalists covering the lead up to the first democratic South African elections in 1994 and I mentioned one of Salgado's images to another photographer which immediately drew a comparison to Kevin Carter's award-winning image of a starving African child being watched by a vulture.  The image was extremely controversial generating questions about the morality of taking such pictures rather than helping the child. Whatever the answer to those questions the truth is that the image generated a huge amount of publicity not only for Kevin Carter (who found it intolerable and committed suicide shortly after winning the Pulitzer prize) but more importantly for the famine happening at the time in Africa. Many of Salgado's photographs could elicit the same questions - is it right to photograph such suffering?

I actually found Salgado's image of a starving child far more devastating than the one of the child being stalked by a vulture. Somehow we human's have projected all the cruelty of humanity onto the vulture who may or may not have been waiting patiently for the child to die; who would never have tried to eat the child while she was still alive; whose species plays an important part in the ecological balance by eating dead animals stopping the rotting meat from causing disease in rivers and on the land;  and now that they are being hunted for their own meat that need is not being met, so decomposing wildebeest lie, piled high, at the edge of rivers making the water unsafe for other animals.  And it was human beings ultimately who ignored the starving child and allowed her to reach starvation point in the first place.  Salgado's image (click through to Number 3) illustrates this clearly as a starving child crawls, dehumanised, more like an emaciated dog than a little girl and ignored by an adult who strides past. This for me more makes his image far more powerful than the vulture one taken by Kevin Carter.

Much of Salgado's work looks at human suffering and he took many such powerful and controversial images during the Ethiopian famine in the 80s.  His latest work is called Genesis which looks at the beauty of the earth in light of its own suffering at the hands of human beings.  As with all his work it is a long term project which he has instigated himself.

I very much like the composition in this (click through) image which is so interesting.  I also like his portraits of individuals which have more impact for me than the ones I saw at the David Bailey exhibition which didn't really grab me.

I went to see some of Salgado's prints this morning at a small gallery in London where they are being sold and do wish I could afford one!  I had to make do with the £10 catalogue - ah, well!

Added later:  Since publishing this I have had a relatively extensive conversation on FB with other students about Salgado and it's been great to do so.  I have realised in the last few weeks how much I rely on non-verbal communication (and trust my semi-conscious instincts) and really find it very uncomfortable to forge any form of connections without, making it difficult to converse about anything with any depth if not face to face but there has been a shift in me I think - for now internet communication is all I have so I am trying to make the most of it.  Anyway, I was pointed to a blog post on OCA .http://weareoca.com/photography/cant-make-up-my-mind/ which is very interesting and discusses the beautification of suffering although in different terms and words.  I have been thinking about the moral questions this poses a lot and the artistic ones too.  I think it is fair to say that Salgado is probably doing things from  place of goodness since he invests an awful lot of time and money into his charity, including reforestation in his home of Brazil.  In the TED talk he comes across as a genuine and sincere human being.  However, he is a very wealthy individual whose life is such that he can chose to travel where-ever he wants and photograph whatever he wants to photograph - namely the poorest people on earth who seemingly have little power and agency over their lives.  He chooses to render these images in a way that is very beautiful  - on the one hand this makes us think about the reality of those people's lives.  On the other hand it would cost you £6000 to buy one of his prints and, if you could afford it, you would no doubt put such a print up on the wall of your very lovely house that cost 1000x that and feel terribly what... virtuous, superior, enlightened?  Art created out of the suffering of others.  While I was in the gallery looking at images of a woman holding her starving baby the people working there were discussing the merits of Harvey Nichols vs Fortnum & Mason's. The incongruity made me very uncomfortable but it is not their fault that Ethiopia happened... or is it - all of our faults for existing as we do and not doing anything about it.

In addition, the images I believe - although I could be wrong here as have relied on another student telling me (but he has sent me a link to something that describes Salgado's post processing I have yet to watch) are taken on a digital camera and processed to emulate certain film stock - of course I have no problem in itself with this.  I do the same ticking the box in Efex Pro of various film simulations when converting to B&W but for me this adds to the worry that the veneer is somehow more important that the content.  I'm being grossly unfair perhaps.  To accuse Salgado of being more interested in appearance than substance is clearly wrong but the words I read in the article about Flickr - kitsch and tedious - keep popping back into my mind.  Everybody talks a great deal about having a style of one's own - this seems to be the great aim of photographers: Chuck Close talks about photographers who are recognised by their style as having reached the pinnacle of their art  - the holy grail in photography - in the BBC documentary I have mentioned in this blog before (will need to look up the title as it escapes me for now) and I can see that this is worth chasing but I feel that the pressure to find an aesthetic style rather than a style from within is a mistake.  Seeing Salgado's work, it would be easy to feel that pressure but I think it would lead to a superficiality.  I really like the message in Gregory Heisler's talk here  that a personal style comes from taking photographs and eventually a style, which is more about how you see the world than how you process your images, will develop.

One of the sentences in the link I mentioned above from the OCA blog says: Salgado seems to ignore the complexity of contemporary visual language. In today’s visual-led society, that’s more than just a little reckless.'  

I have been struggling to work out what this means.  But perhaps I'm beginning to get a glimpse.  I wish I had the time and space to begin Understanding Visual Culture before ending TAOP but that would be crazy for me!  In the meantime for my own photography, I am beginning to see that sometimes (and I don't berate myself because I am learning and that is the point) my images are really about the look rather than anything else.  And sometimes there is something deeper which is more interesting.  I think in the end Salgado's images are certainly thought provoking, very beautiful and worthwhile but there is something very unsettling about the context too.  What I need to think about is - is there something to be said for having a sense of tension between style and substance?

Further information:
Sebastião Salgado Website
The Bang Bang Club - Excellent account of war photo-journalism
Sebastião Salgado Catalogue © Beetles & Huxley, Swallow Street, London