Sebastião Salgado: analysis on his most recent work, Genesis, and art in photojournalism
Since the beginning, photography has always been associated with documentation of life. The ability to 'freeze' a specific moment brought this meaning, but from early days, photographers were able to input their artistic and aesthetic vision on each photograph. Either by choosing the frame, the composition, the film, the light, the exposure and even post-production edit in the dark room, such as burning and dodging specific areas.
It is a relatively young activity. It hasn't had enough discussion and studies on it, so there’s still a lot of room for the bibliography to grow. Some examples of ongoing discussions are the wide spectrum of titles and categories of 6photography activities—such as photojournalism, documentary, anthropology or social photography—the aesthetics uses in those categories and ethical repercussion on some situations photographed.
In this article, a little of those discussions will be contemplated in attempt to bring more light in some of those issues using the work of the photojournalist Sebastião Salgado.
In a dictionary-standard definition, photojournalism is the “job or activity of using photographs to report news stories in magazines or newspaper.”[i] However, the current use of this word gives a broader range of significance.
Describing someone’s activity as a photojournalist actually might mean a lot: from working as a newspaper photographer covering news events and article or working on your own projects, which has many possibilities, from using not just still photography but also combining it with sound or video, doing it as collaborative work and a long-term project.
In these last cases, the use of the word photojournalism might just be a simplistic way to describe a field that searches truth and tells stories of important subjects, since it wouldn’t be breaking news stories.
With the liberty of not being breaking news, photojournalism may also bounce around the art world. Even though journalism seeks objectiveness, in photography there is always the perspective of the photographer and decisions he makes when taking the photograph can change how the public reads it.
Composition, light, rule of thirds, contrast and Cartier-Bresson’s ‘decisive moment’ are all decisions photographers make that affect the outcome—and artists also make them in some way.
When photographing situations where people are suffering, the use of these techniques might give a product with a confusing message of exploitation and dignity. The “awkward boundary between the social engagement of serious documentary photography and the seduction of the image of art”[ii] is how Parvati Nair describes the work of Sebastião Salgado, a Brazilian-born photographer.
Salgado has been an activist since his youth. First, as a member of leftist party in his home country Brazil, where in 1969 the dictatorship was strongly and violently suppressing opposition and forced him to move to France with his wife. There, he was able to get a PhD in Economics and his wife became an architect.
In fact, it was when she first started her architecture career that she bought a camera, but it was Salgado the one who ended up using and photographing more. A few years later he quit his job after realizing he would rather get results of social injustices from photographing instead of economic reports. So he decided to work as a photographer.
Since he started in 1973, social and human conditions have always been his primarily subject. His extensive work on social issues has merited him numerous awards and titles, such as W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography, Grand Prix National de la Photographie, UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador and Brazilian's biggest merit – Comendador da Ordem de Rio Branco.
Salgado is considered one of the greatest photojournalists of this generation. Many call him an anthropology photographer or activist photographer but for him these names are just semantics, because in his words in a TED Talk in 2013, “I did much more than that. I put photography as my life. I lived totally inside photography.” He explains in the Brazilian TV Show Roda Viva[iii] that he photographed what interested him, what he was passionate about. It was always topics that came to him naturally.
First, as a Marxist economist he wanted to expose the conditions of living peasants and the cultural resistance of the Indians in Latin America. From Mexico to Brazil, he visited nine countries, documenting the struggles of people who suffer from arid land, dense fog, death and hunger constantly.
Later, he followed the conditions of manual labor workers on different countries, telling the story of an era, the post-industrialization Revolution, its transition and the last remaining uses of manual work. He photographed workers in the sugar cane and tobacco in Cuba, in the cocoa and gold in Brazil, in the tea plantation in Rwanda, in the shipyards in France and Poland, in the automobiles in Russia and many others.
Working with Médecins sans Frontières in Sahel, Africa, photographing the devastating consequences of the drought, he noticed the movements of migration, and this was also in a time when theories of globalization started to emerge. So he pursued the great migration movements carried out by hunger and wars in the contemporary world, such as genocides in Rwanda, in former Yugoslavia and other places that had 12 thousand deaths a day.
In all his projects, he spent a long time with them, years following his subjects, staying in the same place for weeks, even months at a time. He not only took pictures and left, he connected with the people. He observed and learned their culture prior to shoot photographs. Critics have pointed out that his photographs and subjects always seem too staged and compositions are too perfect, living a feeling of falsity. In a way, this might be true but considering the amount of photos he takes in one trip—he has said to take around 7000 photos—it does make sense that eventually, the perfect moment will happen.
At the end of the last project in Rwanda in 1998, after seeing so much death and misery, he described a lost faith in humanity. He decided to quit photography. He, then, went back to his parents’ land in Aimorés, state of Minas Gerais, in Brazil, which he inherited in 2000. He saw what was once 50 percent of original forest when he was a child it became a devastated land. Salgado took his wife’s idea to reforest all the land and simultaneously founded an institute to help the preservation that could also be a center of environmental education.
While this new project was taking place, he realized how mankind was destroying the planet and decided to make a photography statement against this abuse, showing the air and water pollution, deforestations and others: the prices of development. Thus he started a different project from the others he had done for the last 30 years, but still had the social engagement characteristic of his work. One that was more focused on nature and wild life.
Right in the beginning of the project, they saw how soon nature began to positively respond the reforestation. According to Salgado, with his “faith was restored,”[iv] they decided to approach nature in a different way.
Not in a journalistic, scientific or anthropologist way, he “followed a romantic dream to find and share a pristine world that all too often in beyond our eyes and reach.”[v] In an opposite comparison, Ansel Adams, who also photographed landscapes, had a greater focused as an environmental activist photographing North America’s National Parks, such as Yosemite, advocating for their preservation and succeeding, since government actually agreed to expand them. Salgado’s focus is more in a documenting and showing the beauty of the world, even though, he always has this social engagement intrinsic in his work.
Genesis is Salgado’s most recent project, which he took eight years, around eight months every year and over 32 trips around the world, following all kinds of landscape from the coldest regions in the extreme south and north of the Earth to tropical areas like the Amazon Forest. Besides landscapes and wild animals, he also photographed native tribes from different regions that live life barely touched by modern society. He wanted to present one side of the world that still lives as in the beginning of time, hence the origin of the name Genesis.
In this particular project, he wanted to “explore the beauty of our planet”[vi], and it was the first time he was photographing a different animal, aside from human beings. Even though it changed from human beings to wild animal and landscape, he worked basically in the same way. He kept the same procedures of getting to know and getting as close as possible to the subject, spending some time with them first.
He adapted very little his way of shooting, mainly changing the camera from Leica to a Pentax 465, and learning how to approach and ‘talk’ to wild animals, such as crawling to approximate and facing the animal eye level, “There is a way to integrate with the animals’ lives,” said Salgado in an interview.[vii]
The result was a collection of photographs, which turned into exhibitions and a book—composed with a little too many photographs, with a lot that weren’t so great, but who cares, this doesn’t really matter—and which actually ends up personifying very well the nature and wild life. The photos are distinctly Salgado’s style. This is very obvious when you see some pictures of the Genesis project and quickly is reminded of another ones in different projects.[viii]
In this book, organized with five chapters each representing a large region and could be interpreted as a rough mosaic of five continents of the world, he tries to make a reflection on how society is modifying nature, without making it about misery and devastation. He made a documentation of what can one day be extinct by our modern society. In a similar way of documenting, there is Richard Misrach, who, different from Salgado, has cleaner frame photography—and more abstraction—his landscape photographs show places that almost seem desert and inhabited, without even wild animals.
Simonetta Persichetti, from the Casper Líbero University in Sao Paulo, concludes that Salgado’s work can be seen as a trilogy: Workers, Migrations and to close up, Genesis. In the first, the documentation of people who were being overwhelmed by a world in a new model of economy, then representing the people who were trying to survive and escape the extreme circumstances affected by this new model, at last the display of places and small groups who still live outside this model[ix].
One consistency in all of his projects is that more than exposing and documenting issues, he made photos with such perfection in composition that can also be seen as art. So much that he has had several exhibitions in art museums worldwide, such as Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC, National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, and Art Museum of São Paulo.
In fact, the legitimacy of his photographs in regards of being photojournalism has always been challenged because of their beauty. Not only in this project, the questions of aesthetic relevance were raised in the project Workers and Sahel famine, especially being ones that tell stories of people’s suffering.
Some claim that by taking photographs with aesthetic appealing he is actually dignifying his subjects. Michael Brenson, reviewing the exhibition “An Uncertain Grace” for the New York Times in 1991, said that “form serves content: restraining energy, dignifying death, bringing children up almost into the lens, turning African tribesmen and women into biblical kings and queens.”[x]
However criticisms always were made in opposition. One who strongly opposed was Ingrid Sischy in a New Yorker article in 1991. In her opinion, dignifying a subject with beauty practically corrupts the intentions of photojournalism, “Beauty is a call to admiration, not to action.”[xi] She elaborates how “aestheticize tragedy is the fastest way to anesthetize the feelings of those who are witnessing it.”[xii]
Michael Kimmelman, for the New York Times in 2001 gave an interesting reason for our need to see beauty even in terrible situations. “Two thousand years of Christian art is based on the premise that of course suffering can be beautiful,”[xiii] later comparing Salgado’s photos to artists such as Delacroix’s ''Christ and the Apostles on the Sea of Galilee'' and Millet’s ''Gleaners.''[xiv]
In an article to the New York Times in 1991, Matthew Wald wrote another artistic quality of Sebastião Salgado. In his words he said, “But unlike the typical photojournalist, and more like an artist, he is self-assigned and largely self-scheduled. Even when he is on assignment (and until recently he was under contract to Life magazine), editors are his patrons rather than his supervisors.”[xv]
Besides Salgado, other photographers took the aesthetic composition to send their messages. Steve McCurry and his work in Afghanistan, Lewis Hine and his child labor project and Walker Evans and his documentation on effects of the Great Depression are some examples of photographers who successfully used aesthetics while showing a reality of people in complex conditions. But for Ingrid Sischy, “Evans’s approach to photojournalism was the polar opposite of Salgado’s”[xvi] and she used Lincoln Kirstein’s description to explain that Evans didn’t use as much technique tricks to dramatize “because his material is already, in itself, intensely dramatic.”[xvii]
All photographers working in the photojournalism field search ways to make a change in the world, as utopic as it sounds. Some actually succeed, such as Hine’s project that ended up raising discussion on anti-child labor laws, but others, like Sebastião Salgado, make as much effort as possible—Salgado donated the profit of Sahel famine’s book to Médecins sans Frontières, even though it didn’t eradicate the entire famine of the world.
This criticism like Ingrid Sischy’s, over the photographers who transform someone’s suffering into art—through beauty—it is actually a common situation when it comes to art because it is more about how the public reads, acts and reacts to the photograph rather than the intentions of the photographer, which in this sentence, you can substitute photograph to art and photographer to artist and there you have it.
So Sebastião Salgado appropriates of aesthetic composition throughout the course of his career to “appear as a cultural bridges for predominantly western viewers,”[xviii] said Parvati Nair in her book A Different Light. He searched the best way he could to reach out the higher classes of society and what previous work was “voyages through the trials and tribulations of humanity, this one [Genesis] was my homage to the grandeur of nature,”[xix] explained Salgado.
In earlier years Salgado called himself a documentary photographer, and he has usually been called photojournalist. But he barely has made stories in the breaking news sense. In bottom line, the use of that word it is just a formality, an easier way for the mass people to understand that what he does is related to truth seeking as main purpose.
However, for young photojournalists who are in the beginning of their career, it is a personal and complex question to face. As most photographers in history, it will depend on their body of work, but can also be imposed by the person by choice, the way he or she present himself or herself to the world. It must be kept in mind that any designation might restrict somebody’s work. For example, if Sebastião Salgado were an anthropologist photographer, all his landscape photography might not be as credible as it is.
That might be one reason why he vehemently insists he is not just that.
[i] http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/photojournalism
[ii] Nair, Parvati. A different light: The photography of Sebastião Salgado. London: Duke University Press, 2011. pg. 2
[iii] Roda Viva, Brazilian TV show of interviews by specialists of different fields related to the interviewee by TV Cultura, 09/16/2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IL3Ou7Khl3A
[iv] Salgado, Sebastião. Genesis. Germany: Taschen, 2013. pg. 6
[v] ibid 4 pg.7
[vi] ibid 4
[vii] Interview for the Brazilian documentary Meeting Sebastião Salgado (2012), directed by Betse de Paula
[viii] One example is the photo of colonies of fur seals in Eddystone Rock (pg. 26-27 Genesis) and the photo Panorama of the gold mine Serra Pelada (Workers, 1986)
[ix] ibid 3
[x] Wald, Matthew L. Sebastião Salgado: The Eye of The Photojournalist. New York Times. 06/09/1991. p. 2 http://www.nytimes.com/1991/06/09/magazine/sebastiao-salgado-the-eye-of-the-photojournalist.html?src=pm&pagewanted=2
[xi] Sischy, Ingrid. Photography: Good Intentions. New York: New Yorker. 09/09/1991. http://paulturounetblog.files.wordpress.com/2008/03/good-intentions-by-ingrid-sischy.pdf
[xii] Ibid 11
[xiii] Kimmelman, Michael. PHOTOGRAPHY REVIEW; Can Suffering Be Too Beautiful? New York: New York Times. 06/13/2001. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/13/arts/photography-review-can-suffering-be-too-beautiful.html?src=pm&pagewanted=1
[xiv] ibid 13
[xv] ibid 10 pg.2
[xvi] ibid 11
[xvii] ibid 11
[xviii] ibid 2
[xix] ibid 4