Reshaping the lens of our eyes

Sebastiao Salgado, the internationally acclaimed photographer, died on May 23. Born in Brazil in 1944, the economics graduate left for France in 1969 as a political refugee. He took up photography full-time in 1973. His powerful black and white photographs of the dispossessed, the violated and the exploited across continents — as well as his work documenting the grandeur, but also the fragility, of nature, its creatures and peoples — shaped global consciousness for decades.

STANDING before a photograph by Sebastiao Selgado, we are in the inescapable experience of the earth making us. We can feel the land, sky, water, the human face and figure, the light — like probing fingers — reshaping the lens of our eyes. Not only widening the sheer expanse, but also giving us the ability to see details in the many distances unfolding before us. As the earth of his photographs makes us, we see what we are making of our earth. And what we are making of ourselves and of each other on this earth. The photographs stretch our vision — in every sense — and in the process fill us with pain and terror, remorse and awe that we did not know we could feel. His haunting, heart-rending 1986 photographs of the manual labourers in the Serra Pelada gold mine in Brazil are probably his most recognised work. Some of the photographs are taken from the edge of the almost half a mile-deep monumental mine pit. The hacked, torn gorge is swarming with thousands of labourers climbing up and down hundreds of thin, handmade ladders with sacks of earth on their back. The shimmering furore of the photograph explodes into our gaze because Salgado has waited days to find the right distance from the event, for the conflicting textures of light and shadow, for the overlapping volumes and the granular, receding depths that would not only hold his solicitude but also capture the throbbing rhythms of a large humanity’s self-enslavement to gold. And then there are other photographs in the series with closer views of the labourers. Often, the figure stands parallel to the picture frame, but what could have been a static composition palpitates — with the light and shadows carving the planes of the face, with the rising and receding patterns created by the posture of the head and torso and arms, and whatever cloth worn by the figure, smeared and curling, falling in forceful lines. These various lines, textures, patterns provoke surface clashes of various intensities and, in fact, help to sculpt before our eyes the figure’s inner life of desperation, anguish and hope. All of Salgado’s work is in black and white. And this series of photographs from Serra Pelada restored black and white photography’s status to the world of younger photographers and the media who, till then, believed that colour photography was the only way to document modern life.

The aesthetic rigor of Salgado has been celebrated, but also unsparingly criticised. Some critics believe that the purposeful beauty of the photographs reinforces passivity towards the reality they present. That they weaken the power of the reality to move us to action. Perhaps the critique is worth considering with a few more questions: is any reality — violent, harrowing or otherwise — separate from the larger reality surrounding it? Is any person’s suffering to be denied its complete circumstance because an aspect of it might also be beautiful? Does not the very condition of how any photograph is framed carry a choice as to how we see the world? And, if so, why should we believe that established notions of documentary photography give us the ‘reality’ of suffering and death more convincingly instead of, let’s say, enclosing us in a pitying passivity? Salgado believed that “the beauty of the photographs lends dignity to the people in them”. Also, and this is important too, his photographs are always in series, never just an isolated single. This certainly helps to open the social and cultural space and economic context more widely than any other photographer’s work on a similar event. As John Berger writes about Salgado’s work, “If we accept what is happening in pictures like these, we are face to face with the tragic. And what happens in face of the tragic is that people have to accept it and cry out against it, although it won’t change anything. And they cry out, very frequently, to the sky. In many of his pictures, the sky is very important. Spectators who have lost any sense of tragedy look at his skies and say, ‘Ha! What a beautiful set, what a well-chosen moment.’ But it isn’t a question of aesthetics. The tragic sky is the only thing that can be appealed to in certain circumstances. Who listens to them in the sky? Perhaps God. Perhaps the dead. Perhaps even history.” Salgado’s work impels us to see the world as a dialogue with numerous realities alive in every moment. Here is a photographer who does not see himself as just a reporter or a chronicler, but an artist who uncovers the complex stories behind apparently simple incidents. And that is why his work is recognised universally for its power to protect human rights and dignity, a force for transformation and ecological conservation. Much of his life has been in war zones, in countries devastated by famine, in documenting the harrowing life of workers and, not stopping there, but following the workers’ migration from countryside to city in 43 countries, on every continent. In India, his photographs of the Dhanbad coal miners are stark, anguishing, but also hold a tenderness that only emerges among companions learning from each other. Salgado said that one of his last photographic projects, ‘Genesis’, began when he felt that his previous projects, which had shown him such a hell of human cruelty and violence, had made him lose his faith in humanity. ‘Genesis’ took him to 32 countries and seven years to complete. It is a monumental tribute to the staggering diversity of life in and on the edges of our sea, in our mountains and forests and deserts. We see a whale rising like dark lava from an undersea volcano. We see deep into the snapping mouth of a walrus on a rocky shore populated by thousands of penguins. We see an elephant’s walk through an arid landscape raising dust as thick as a storm-cloud around itself. We see many indigenous people, like the nomadic Dinka in Sudan with their cattle’s horns as hefty and long as some of their young men, living a life that seems to belong to centuries in the past or to myths and folk tales. In 1998, Salgado and his wife founded a nonprofit, Instituto Terra, to restore the native Atlantic Forest, one of Brazil’s most threatened, on their old family farm. His last years were spent restoring the property until its regrown forest and the return of wildlife turned it into a national park. Before his death, this helped him overcome his loss of faith and provided the impetus to think of more work in the future. — The writer is an acclaimed filmmaker — They say I was an ‘aesthete of misery’ and tried to impose beauty on the poor world. But why should the poor world be uglier than the rich world? The light here is the same as there. The dignity here is the same as there. — Sebastiao Salgado in an interview with The Guardian, 2024 (Reuters) — Through the lens of his camera, Sebastiao fought tirelessly for a fairer, more humane, and more ecological world. — Sebastiao Salgado’s family

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