The National Arts Club - About the Artists


	Sebastião Salgado The Photography Committee will award the Medal of Honor to Sebastião Salgado in a black tie ceremony on Tuesday, May 24, 2005. This event is open to members only.

Sugar-cane Plantations. 1987.

From "The Lyric Documentarian" by Fred Ritchin

Being a photographer has allowed Sebastião Salgado extended contact with people throughout the world, and it is around this contact that he believes his work revolves. “The picture is not made by the photographer,” he remarked in a somewhat rare public explanation of his approach, “the picture is more good or less good in function of the relationship that you have with the people you photograph.” In the Sahel, for example, he preferred to take a bus rather than rent a car, because when one arrives by car “it’s a disaster--you are a guy with a car,” a rich guy, and not “with the people.” Or, as he put it more broadly, “You need to be accepted by reality.” The philosophy also jibes with his sense of personal economy--by traveling third class, rolling his own film, working sixteen-hour days making thousands of small proof prints himself, he was able to accomplish his various extended reportages in the Sahel--in Chad, Ethiopia (including the disputed Tigre province), Mali, and the Sudan--for the very minimal sum of $20,000, with printing being the major expense.

He prefers his way to that of some of the better-funded media personnel. He pointedly remarks, for example, on how during the three or four weeks he spent in one Ethiopian camp over forty television teams reporting on the multitudes of starving and ill came and quickly went--one crew arrived from the United States, chartered a government bus, spent two hours and went back. By contrast, in the other less symbolically important countries in the Sahel he saw only one other journalist. In these cases he finds there is a kind of short-circuited reporting that leaves “no time to identify the reality you are photographing.” Instead, one manages only to “bring back what you bring with you.”

He compares his own photographic strategy with perhaps the most famous single philosophy of 35 mm photography ever espoused, that of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment.” In 1952 Cartier-Bresson, a founding member of Salgado’s [former] agency, Magnum Photos, expressed his much-quoted credo in the classic volume of his photographs, The Decisive Moment: “To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression.”

Such an approach, Salgado feels, results in a relationship between photographer and subject that is comparable to a tangent perfectly balanced on top of a circle. It is elegant, dramatic, effective, but for himself he feels he must enter the circle, almost, in a sense, “becoming” those he photographs, at the very least working to understand the existence of those he depicts.

Despite the geometric metaphor, Salgado’s approach is an intuitive, highly emotional one. While he speaks four languages (Portuguese, Spanish, French, and, now, English) and profits from lengthy discussions with the people he meets, it is not an intellectual analysis of the other that he works from. It is from a personal warmth, and an extraordinary reverence for their essential dignity. His approach at least begins, in its respectful empathy, to approximate Martin Buber’s sense of the relationship between I and Thou, where the other momentarily becomes one’s whole world. His point of view is also motivated by the sentimental, populist embrace of a Marxist-influenced economist. “You photograph with all your ideology” is the way Salgado has put it.

His informed empathy and the outsized beauty of so many of his images serve to transcend the common journalistic shorthand that depicts people reductively, according to the degree of their latest victimization. This shorthand also tends to render its subjects anonymous, particularly in the Third World where it takes masses of ultimately interchangeable “victims” for the Western press to pay attention. In the process, people tend to be denuded of their larger, more complicated humanity, including their culture and the internal resources that allow for self-determination. Such a ploy serves to tug momentarily at us in the affluent North until we succumb to “compassion fatigue” and go on to the next grouping of two-dimensional figures to be temporarily featured.

The Serra Pelada gold mine. Brazil, 1986

By spending more time with people, Salgado feels, he is able to see their suffering and their strength, which approaches at times a spiritual ascendancy. And the sheer grandeur of the imagery, its recognition of nature’s vastness, with chiaroscuro lighting and tones that at times seem to swell upward form a profound darkness, making palpable the etched skin of those depicted, aids as well in allowing the people depicted to take a more resonant, enduring, differentiated position in our collective history. The photographers’ documentary ambition may have originated in part from an initial nostalgia, but the images themselves maintain a vitalized presence.

Yet photographers are caught in a curious bind. Cartier-Bresson, who at various times derided the documentary impulse in favor of the visual drama, the pursuit of an unfolding choreography, was well aware of the reality/unreality that one is constantly coming up with, the inevitable intermix of fiction and nonfiction. “The pictures... that follow,” he stated rather ironically in he beginning of his 1968 book, The World of Henri Cartier-Bresson, “are not intended to give a general idea of any country, but I am quite unable to assert that the subjects depicted are imaginary and that any resemblance to any individual is coincidental.” Salgado’s more consistently documentary approach also has its highly interpretive, imaginary aspects, which, despite the apparent matter-of-factness of photography, give the imagery much of its depth. One might say that, while respecting the facts of a situation, Salgado attempts to re-create, though visual metaphor, what he sees as its essential human drama--the invisible made visible.

First communion in Juazeiro do Norte. Brazil, 1981.

Salgado’s work, while confined to the moment by the mechanics of the camera, is drawn less to celebrating and taming an instant’s arbitrariness, its material manifestations, but more to articulating its eternity, its ephemeral profundity, and to locating a mythic, entwining presence. This aspect of his approach is something he has in common with other Latin Americans drawn to what has been called a “magical realism.” Similarly, while recognizing the individual’s singular importance in his images, he is also quick to draw relationship to the universal. “We are all one people--we are probably all one man,” he has asserted. There is, enmeshed in his document of the moment--on Latin American peasants, famine in Africa, or his project on manual workers around the world--a resonating lyric, a sense of the epic, and iconic landscape. The former economist invokes a poetic sense of struggles so profound that, in large, moody prints, the forces of light and darkness, of life and death, are summoned in scenes reminiscent at times of the most dramatic Judeo-Christian symbolism.