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Salgado: Photography as Ideology
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20599 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1992 |
1,316 Words |
| Author
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Judith Bell
Judith Bell is an art historian and novelist based in
Arlington, Virginia. |
"Salgado photographs people. Causal photographers photograph phantoms," states Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano in his introduction to An Uncertain Grace, the Aperture book accompanying the first major North American exhibition of Sebastiao Salgado's work, organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
These few words speaks volumes about the Brazilian-born Salgado, whose coverage of major news events as well as more personal in-depth documentary projects has shown him to be a photographer who does remove. Rather, he confronts them with a palpable humanity made up of skin, hair, and finally eyes that lead straight to the soul in all of us.
From victims of African famine to mud-covered Brazilian gold seekers to peasants in Mexico and Brazil to women making bricks in India, Salgado captures individual lives, making his connections ours. And although his images speak of the romantic, the heroic, they also address an unbearable, inconsolable sadness. It is Salgado's unflinching vision of this tension between the light and the dark defining human experience that gives his work its greatness. As Galeano reminds us, Salgado means "salty" in Portuguese.
Salgado was born in 1944 in the remote interior state of Minas Gerais, where his father had relocated in 1930 after having political problems with the government. The only boy in a family of eight children. Salgado first lived on a cattle farm and then in Aimores, a small nearby town of ten thousand with no electricity. The telephone and television didn't arrive until after Salgado had left home to study economics. Upon earning his master's degree from Sao Paulo University, he went on to complete his doctorate at the University of Paris.
A Marxist-influenced economist interested in aiding development in the Third World, Salgado worked for the International Coffee Organization headquartered in London, where he assisted in the diversification of coffee plantations in Africa. It was while on assignment in Africa that he first experimented with a camera he had borrowed from his wife. Working with the camera was an epiphanic experience: Salgado decided that rather than work at the remove of a social scientist he would prefer spending time with the people to whom he was drawn, photographing them rather than depicting them in economic reports.
"You photograph with all your ideology," Salgado has said. Throughout his nearly twenty-year career as a photojournalist he has continued to consider contact with
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