Sebastião Salgado: the camera’s compassionate eye

I

Sebastião Salgado (born 1944) is the greatest living photographer.  He has roamed through more than 100 countries, on all the continents of the earth, sometimes at considerable risk.  Born on a farm in a poor Brazilian town of 16,000, he could say with Miranda in The Tempest: “I have suffered with those that I saw suffer.”  Trained as an economist, he moved to Paris and later joined the Magnum agency of photographers.  He works closely with his wife Lélia, who designs his superb books and organizes his exhibitions.

The Children (2000) contains 90 portraits of migrant, refugee and displaced children under the age of 15 in the Balkans, South America, the Middle East, Africa and Asia.  This compassionate and socially committed artist creates clear, dramatic, intense black-and-white images.  The background is always important to frame his well-composed pictures.  He prints the captions at the end of the book so the pictures of people oppressed by their environment speak for themselves.  He believes, like Joseph Conrad, that his task is “to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see.  That—and no more, and it is everything.”

Salgado explains, “In every crisis situation—whether war, deep poverty or natural disaster—children are the greatest victims.  The weakest physically, they are invariably the first to succumb to disease or starvation.”  His subjects, often addicted to glue or crack, are forced to survive “by begging or snatching handbags or selling sexual services.”  Through their clothes, poses, expressions and eyes, they tell “their stories with disarming frankness and dignity.”  Salgado usually portrays the head, chest and ragged clothes of these single figures.  Shot close up, they are lit from the left and stand in front of a rough background that contrasts to their smooth skin.  These vulnerable victims have lost their parents and bonded with Salgado, who suffers the little children to come unto him.  He rescues them, if only momentarily, from their desperate condition and gives them a kind of poignant dignity, permanence and hope.

Afghanistan: Standing in front of a pock-marked wall and wearing a roughly embroidered jacket over a dirty shirt, a boy thrusts his hands into his pockets.  He tilts his domed shaved head downward and lifts his eyes to show the whites beneath the dark irises.  His expression is defiant, tight-lipped, wary and pensive.

Brazil: Wearing a skirt and short striped buttoned blouse, a girl spreads her fingers across her slightly distended bare belly.  She has high wiry hair with a broad forehead that reflects the light, and her wide-open eyes stare boldly at the camera.

Rwanda-Tutsi: Sitting on a high wooden stool and placing her bare feet with shining white toenails on a crossbar, she’s posed in front of a wall built with huge grey stones.  She wears a white woollen sweater, and wraps a fringed shawl around her middle and down to her bare knees.  Her arms are crossed on her chest, her head is shaved, her ears protrude, and her half-shadowed face is suitably sombre.

Lebanon: This girl has wavy dark hair, curved lips and large eyes swiveled to the right.  Her chin rests on her crossed arms (one with a scar near the elbow) that lie on a scratched table.  Her mood is self-absorbed and melancholy.

India: This handsome, older, self-confident adolescent boy, with thick dark hair reaching down to his eyebrows, has clear eyes, strong nose and firm mouth.  He’s wrapped in a rough shawl with two thin white stripes and stares confidently into the camera.  The white background contrasts to his dark face, lit from the left and shadowed on the right.

Brazil: Unlike the other compact and confined subjects, this young girl stands beneath a cloudy sky in a landscape of wooded hills.  The white streak of a river flows between two reedy banks and behind her head and chest.  With a star-like mark painted on her white cheek and a tattoo on her chest, she wears a high white feathered headdress and a skirt made of thin dangling palm leaves.   Her small bulbous breasts are just beginning to stand out from her slim dark body.  She’s seen in a three-quarter view and turns her head to look straight at the camera.  She has high cheekbones, firm nose, sensual lips, black hair touching her shoulders and a gentle glance.

II

In The Workers: An Archeology of the Industrial Age (1993) Salgado observes: “History is an endless cycle of oppressions, humiliations and disasters. . . . The developed world produces only for those who can consume—approximately one-fifth of all people.  The remaining four-fifths have no way of becoming consumers.”  The 350 photographs of dehumanising toil in farms, factories, mines, fishing boats, oil wells, tunnels and canals bear witness to this cruel history.  The slave-labourers, whom Jack London called “the people of the abyss,” are the poorest of the poor, weary beyond exhaustion, trapped and condemned to lives nasty, brutish and short.  But Salgado, outraged by injustice and sympathising with the underdog, magically transforms their horrific existence into deeply moving images.

Trapani in western Sicily is the spawning ground of enormous shoals of giant bluefish tuna that swim to the island each spring to procreate.  Fishermen gather early in the morning for the start of La Mattanza, the killing of tuna that are caught in labyrinthine traps and lifted out by hand.  Salgado writes, “They have been waiting for several days for the tuna to arrive.  When the sea currents become favourable, the crews go out in their boats and catch fish in the chambered nets.”

Salgado captures the fishermen celebrating their catch and thanking their patron saint  during the Easter services.  A gigantic, brightly lit, open-mouthed, sharp-finned tuna, seen from below and suspended by three fish-shaped ropes between two houses in a narrow street, seems to be surrealistically swimming in the grey sky.  Two men standing on balconies (one head next to the lofty tuna’s tail) chat with each other and look down on the street.  Below the elevated tuna four tall painted statues in a procession carry high spears and wear medieval helmets decorated with feathers.

Salgado notes that “the grand master, the great fisherman, the man who holds the secrets to the fish, the currents, the tides” takes charge of La Mattanza.  This massive, heroic Ahab-like figure dominates the front of the photograph and the ten-man crew.  Two of them have their hands on the oar, ready to row the long boat out to sea. The captain has a fierce look, deeply grooved face, parted lips, gap-teeth, trimmed white beard and long curled hair along his neck.  He wears a white cap decorated with stylized jumping fish, a gold chain and a tee shirt with the word Trapani partly obscured by a wrinkled rubber sheet over his bare arms.  The men behind him, with rough and weary faces, form an elevated pyramid.  Two men form an apex next to the standing helmsman, whose head is aligned with the captain’s cap.  The background shows a lowering grey sky, peaked mountain, wavy sea and five-man boat with furled sails just reaching a man on the dock who receives their catch.  Salgado captures a way of life that is both savage and traditional.

Salgado’s words describe the dreadful working conditions in Chittagong, Bangladesh: “in a room with more than five hundred looms, jute is woven into fabric.  Thread is carried by a wooden shuttle that moves from one side of the loom to the other at great speed.  The incredible sound when the shuttle is sent off, multiplied by five hundred, creates a tremendous noise in this humid, dusty room.”  One visible steel beam with a useless fire extinguisher precariously supports the entire structure.  Exhausted and resigned, twenty dark-skinned men, wearing torn undershirts and sarongs, work in the suffocating heat and deafening throb of the textile factory.  In a rare moment of idleness and rest they face the wide-angle camera and show the whites of their eyes.  In an increasingly blurred focus, ascending rows of hundreds of machines reach the top of the room.  The men seem attached by the threads and bobbins to the closely packed looms that tower above and trap them.  They seem to have become as mechanical as the machines that control their working lives.

Most of Salgado’s photographs focus on people.  In Gdansk, Poland, his subject is a newly-built Russian cargo ship whose name in Cyrillic letters reads Nadezhda (Hope), seen from above on the port side.  Violently launched sideways into the still harbour, the ship forces a high cataract of water to shoot up from both sides.  The wildly tilting ship seems about to sink before water pressure forces it onto an even keel and upright position.  It is surrounded on the opposite dock by four tall cranes and grim industrial buildings.  In the foreground about 40 people dressed for winter stand on a raised ramp surrounded by seven Polish flags to observe the extraordinary event.  The length of the ship is 89 meters, the width 12.5 meters, the speed seven knots.  It is, right now, carrying an unknown cargo and sailing through the Black Sea from Turkey to Russia.

Poland builds a ship, Bangladesh destroys it, and Salgado explains how a vessel is prepared for demolition.  The ship “puts its engine on full speed and heads for the land, wailing and groaning as it reaches a speed that it would never have dared risk at sea.  Its steel hull scrapes the sand, reaching into the earth from where it came. Then it stops, grounded, the end of its final charge, its last journey.”  Ten workers and seven distant figures in the background are breaking up the keel of a ship to sell its valuable steel.  They bend over using primitive hammers and hoes to shift the sand plowed up by the ship.  Two men seen from behind walk away with heavy burdens on their heads.  Thick steel-linked cables and winches drag thick pieces of metal along the beach.  The men are overshadowed by two gigantic ships on the shore (with a tiny solitary man standing between them) ready to be torn apart.  The still waters reflect the sunlight, and a huge porthole from a piece of the grounded ship looks like the entrance to Hell —ready to devour the men when they can no longer work.

III

The Sahel is a desperately poor region of drought, famine and disease.  It stretches across northern Africa from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea, and includes Mali, Niger, Chad, Ethiopia and the Sudan.  Salgado, whose camera is “devoted to rescuing the forgotten from the Sahel onward,” has chronicled the “expelled, rejected, outlawed millions of pariahs who wander the world” and continue to flee from the Sudan today. The first edition of Sahel: The End of the Road (Madrid 1988, Berkeley 2004), in which the living dead are as close to extinction as they can get and still be alive, was considered at first too depressing to publish.  The photographs bearing witness to parents watching their children die of starvation are almost too painful to describe.  Dante himself could scarcely devise a crueler fate.

The staring, grimacing, naked boy in Mali, with emaciated limbs, bulging rib cage and dangling genitals, holds a wind-blown black rag.  He looks into the distance for food,  but  nothing is there except more sand blown by the wind.  Alone in the barren desert, he’s supported by a thin stick and stands next to a dead tree that echoes his near-death condition.  In a desolate refugee camp a tall, half-blind, wispy-bearded man with a deeply grooved face wears a dirty djellaba open to his chest.  He stoically holds his scrawny dead child, his long fingers supporting the hanging head.  Rough-hewn huts topped with palm leaves appear behind him, and a camel with his head flat on the ground has reached its limit and is dead.

In Ethiopia a crowded high-altitude camp is divided by an empty plain.  In the foreground about 50 people wrapped in white cloths are seated and huddled together.  In the distance the more fortunate refugees have found shelter in cone-shaped grass huts.  A wide-winged, well-fed hawk carrying its prey flies between them—a bitter symbol of survival as the people become the prey.  Salgado writes of another camp: “In Kalema, west of Tigray, thousands of refugees crowd under trees to wait for nightfall, when they will continue their long 20-day journey on foot to the Sudan.  They hide in these thickets to escape the surveillance of the Ethiopian army’s MiGs [their only contact with the modern world].  During the day they sit quietly in small groups without making fires, so as not to be spotted by the planes shooting with machine guns to capture and resettle them.  Then their exodus resumes in darkness.”  An uncountable mass of robed refugees, some clutching infants, gather around a deeply grooved baobab tree that offers some meager protection from the burning sun.  A wide stream of light, an almost biblical Annunciation, emerges from the sky and hits an empty bit of sand.  But like the hawk, its hope is illusory and few people will survive this death march on foot.

An Ethiopian woman gives birth, her face half-hidden and body covered by a long grey cloth, assisted by two European nurses and an African midwife.  The parted legs of the kneeling blond nurse suggest the usual ventral delivery.  The mother squats at a right angle to the ground, facing way from the nurses, to deliver the infant in her traditional way.  A fourth woman holds the mother’s lowered head and shoulder as the bloody baby with one arm extended emerges next to her bare foot in a pool of blood. It’s tragically ironic that this new life has no future and will probably not survive.

IV

 Much of independent Africa is now worse off than it was under colonial rule.  In the introduction to Africa (2007) a Mozambican novelist writes optimistically of “the overthrow of apartheid, the collapse of the colonial regimes, the victorious guerrilla war, the promise of a new start.”  But she admits that ethnic, historical and tribal violence has allowed “a criminal elite to manipulate people and utilize the lives of others to hold onto power and accumulate vast wealth.”  Conrad foreshadowed the tragic fate of Africa in Under Western Eyes: “The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane and devoted natures; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement—but it passes away from them.  They are not the leaders of a revolution.  They are its victims: the victims of disgust, of disenchantment—often of remorse.  Hopes grotesquely betrayed, ideals caricatured—that is the definition of revolutionary success.”

Salgado photographs the results of decades of the civil war in the former Portuguese colony of Angola (1975-2002).  In the spiky, dry and harsh landscape a burned, blackened, half-flayed corpse lies on a white foreground with spread legs and hidden head.  His executioners stand above him.  One of them, dressed in a camouflage uniform and holding a machine gun, looks down on him.  The others point to the sky, searching either for help or for enemy planes that might attack them.  Elsewhere, an undernourished child and victim of war is too weak to eat and must be fed intravenously.  His forehead and nose bandaged with tubes, his half-open mouth struggles for breath, his hands are crossed above his bulging rib cage.  His mother sits beside him, wearing pretty earrings and a startlingly clean white blouse.  She rests her hands on her knees and looks straight at the camera, hoping for salvation that will never come.

In Namibia an attractive woman of a nomadic tribe is seen in three-quarter profile, gazing to the left.  Her flock of black-and-white goats graze behind her in a barren landscape.  She is elaborately dressed and decorated with a feathered cap, long twisted braids, circles of neck rings and beaded leather straps.  Her left hand just emerges  from beneath her robe, and her bare breasts have nursed the baby hanging head-down on her back.  Her two small children with half-shaved heads, necklaces and bare chests look up at her.  This domestic scene in the wilderness is surprisingly tranquil and touching.

A Rwandan refugee, stricken with cholera, falls across his wife’s chest in a pietà pose.  His wife looks to the right; his wide-eyed face drops helplessly to the left, his open arms (with IV attached) spread across her legs and touch his own.  Both subjects wear handsomely patterned cloth garments.  A barely visible man, with a sandaled foot and flowering white decoration on his dark robe, stands above them.  Behind them, to the left and right on the rough-hewn floor, are some modern debris: a tin cooking pot, a plastic water container and an empty aid carton suggest his end is near.

One panoramic photograph taken in Senegal depicts a huge, circular, concrete reservoir exactly in the middle.  Men with buckets and ropes stand on the rim and haul out the water.  The reservoir is surrounded by a semicircle of large water drums tied onto flat carts and pulled by scrawny horses.  A white truck on the left edge carries more water than all the buckets and drums combined.  In the  background cattle graze on the flat plain that extends to the top of the picture.  The men work hard to extract the precious water and barely survive on their meager portions.

Another panoramic picture captures the traditional life of the Dinkas in Southern Sudan.  In the dusty, cloudy setting three robed men guide a mass of long-horned cattle back to their shelter at night.  The men in the midst of these sharp horns seem absorbed into the herd and reduced to the elemental level of the animals they depend on for survival.

V

Salgado has provided an excellent introduction to Kuwait: A Desert on Fire (2016), with spectacular photographs that illuminate the filthiest and most dangerous work on earth.  In 1990-91 the Iraqi army, retreating from the American troops driving them out of Kuwait, sabotaged 600 oil wells.  The noise was deafening and the heavy smoke, which obliterated the sun and limited the visibility of American aircraft, also drove up the price of Iraqi oil.  Salgado writes: “all around, thick pillars of crude oil spewed into the sky before falling back to earth to form treacly black lakes that, without warning, could become gigantic infernos. . . . In the midst of this man-made disaster, oil engineers and technicians from North America and Europe were already hard at work to reverse it, risking life and limb to put out raging well fires and cap runaway gushers.”  Fighting toxic fumes and fires exploding 40 feet into the air, they extinguished the fires by using high-pressure water hoses attached to water tankers, and sealed the wells with “a mixture of water and a clay-like powder, pumped down the pipe until it blocked the oil flow through sheer weight.”

This book has no guiding captions.  On page 47 small fires burn on the left.  On the right, a high white cloud of fire shoots out of the oil well and into the smoke-filled black sky.  This scene ironically recalls “the pillar of cloud by day [and] the pillar of fire by night”  that in Exodus 13:22 guided the exiled Israelites back to the Promised Land.

On page 151 three workers wearing helmets, goggles and rubber suits are knee-deep and soaked with oil.  Struggling with a gigantic circular machine, they try to seal off the exploding well.  In the vast lava-like background several other wells continue to burn with smoky fires.

On page 87 two oil soaked, bare-headed workers with rubber gloves and boots lie on the ground.  Overcome with exhaustion, they look like wounded soldiers on a battlefield.  One man, his head dropped down, rests against the hydrant and ignores the small gushing well.  The other man, leaning on his elbow, holds a small wrench that cannot possibly contain the eruption.  This scene recalls Phlegethon in the 7th Circle of Dante’s Inferno, a river of burning blood that submerges and boils tyrants and murderers.

Human beings are not the only victims.  A small black bird with feathers plastered down by oil in unable to fly and cannot find food.  Salgado notes that the “once-powerful (and expensive) Arab stallions,” owned by the Kuwaiti royal family, “were reduced to sad skeletal figures as they struggled to find grass to eat in a wooded area that had previously been their privileged home.”  On page 191 a starving oil-splattered horse, destined for death, stands amid barren trees in a black and devastated landscape.  As Marlowe exclaims in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: “The horror!  The horror!”

VI

Salgado explains the setting of one of his most famous pictures in Gold (2019): “Not since the building of pyramids by thousands of slaves, or the Klondike gold rush in Alaska, has succeeded an epic-scale human drama been witnessed: fifty thousand mud-soaked men digging for gold at Serra Pelada [Bald Mountain] in the Brazilian state of Pará.”  The workers dig the dirt, fill the sacks with it and carry it down to the sorting area.  They then choose one sack to search through for gold without knowing which sack is best.  If gold is found, each worker is paid a premium.  There are no machines in that remote place: all the work is done by hand.  In one of Salgado’s most famous images the insect-like toilers climb up rickety ladders to speed their ascent.  This open-top gold mine the size of a football field resembles Breughel the Elder’s Tower of Babel.

It’s dangerous, even fatal, to fall from the high ladders into a toxic lake, and the descent through frequent landslides is even more difficult than the climb.  Dwarfed by gigantic stone blocks torn out of the mountain, and driven by dreams of gold and the chance of sudden wealth, thousands of men crawl up the steep path.  A long narrow wooden sluice that pans the gold cuts across the foreground.  On the right four men descend to their hopeless quest while two others carry 100-pound sacks up the slippery slope.

The precious yield ranges from 99% of earth and stones to powdered gold and precious nuggets, some fabulous specimens weighing as much as 114 pounds.  A branch of the state-owned bank buys gold at a 15 percent discount from the daily price in London and a smelter shapes the gold into bars.  By 1992 the mining company had extracted 30 tons of gold worth $400 million.  But only a fraction went to the workers, who never abandoned hope and continued to work until they dropped.

Gold also offers close-ups of these miserable slaves who toil in the crowded anthill of the mine.  A bunch of men—with white caps, bare chests and muscular legs—look like a rugby scrum.  A mud-soaked man, with a bandana, hairy arms and incongruous curly blond locks, carries a soaking and intolerably heavy burden on his back.  A man with one staring eye is about to collapse as the rope of his sack cuts deeply into his creased hand.  A single hand reaches down from the top of another picture to grab a falling man.  A man sunk and crumpled into the mud is rescued by his comrades; a wounded man is carried down to his shack.

Two men eagerly pan for gold in a filthy pond.  Three men are overseen by the idle moustachioed capitalistas with their handbags of money.  They lean on a table next to bunches of bananas, and a little boy—destined for this work—crouches beneath them.  An accordion player, amid hundreds of cigarette butts, entertains a seated audience, revealed only by their legs and feet.  His little box receives their meager offerings of cruzeiros.  When a fight breaks out an armed soldier in a clean uniform keeps order among the greedy and violent diggers, who brutally beat the thieves who break their code.  Leaning against a tall pillar with bare chest and crossed arms, and looking sadly down, an exhausted young worker seems ready to be shot with arrows like a saint.  There are no women, animals or landscapes in these photographs to relieve the endless agony, or to alleviate the bitter contrast between the artistic images and the grim subjects.

Salgado is drawn to the suffering of poor people victimised by modern greed, and persuades his viewers to see the grim reality they would rather ignore.  His images precisely show disasters in the Third World, reveal the human cost of drought, famine and mining gold, and create beauty out of horror.

Jeffrey Meyers, FRSL, has had 33 of his 54 books translated into fourteen languages and seven alphabets, and published on six continents. 

A Message from TheArticle

We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout these hard economic times. So please, make a donation.