“We are a violent, vicious species. Our history is a history of war.” Sebastião Salgado should know. Few photographers have so deeply penetrated and expertly chronicled the painful realms of conflict and poverty than the Brazilian photojournalist and social documentarian.
Salgado shoots largely in black-and-white across many genres, including bold, expansive landscapes. His best-known work focuses on the human condition, however, especially the effects of corruption, greed, authoritarianism, hunger, joblessness, and climate change on migrants, refugees, workers, and their families.
Salgado was a respected economist early in his career. He switched to photography when he realized that he could have greater impact on behalf of downtrodden people by shooting their images than generating data about them. He cares passionately about people who are, he says, "the salt of the earth." Interestingly, it's Salgado's background in economics that help him give context to his work by knowing, in his words, "what's really driving the world."
The 2014 "The Salt of the Earth" documentary by German filmmaker Wim Wenders and Salgado's son Juliano tells the photographer's powerful story. Yes, it can be hard to watch at times, given the grim realities of the Rwandan genocide, for example, or the Yugoslavian civil wars. It's the film's opening, however, that grabs you buy the throat - staggering, deeply disturbing images of thousands of slave-laborers excavating and lugging gold from a gigantic, mud-infested pit in Brazil's Serra Pelada (two of the four images below). Salgado said the whole scene felt like "the dawn of mankind." That's until you realize that these serried, ant-like beings in the mud pits are slaves only to the hope of getting rich. They are free men who are determined to be wealthy men.
Salgado believes the best photographers - and storytellers - are driven by curiosity. His curiosity has delivered him to 120 countries under every conceivable circumstance. In the process, he and his wife, Lélia Wanick Salgado who runs their photo press agency Amazonas Images, have published numerous, large-format books with titles such as "Gold," "Workers," "Exodus," or "Genesis."
A scene in "The Salt of the Earth" film speaks volumes about Salgado's gift for composition. A polar bear happened upon their trailer on a remote island in the Russian Arctic. In addition to ensuring the team's safety, of course, Salgado, his son, and Wim Wenders struggled to capture the right images of the lurking creature. They were beset with "bad framing," given the path the bear took to their camp. "This spot is no good," he says. "There's nothing in the background; nothing to compose a well-framed picture. You'll just show a bear, but it won't be a photograph." I think we can all relate to the challenge of compositional inadequacy.
