Sabastiao Salgado - Sahel: The End of the Road and The Mines of Serra Pelada,

Sabastiao Salgado

http://www.amazonasimages.com/accueil


Sabastiao Salgado is a Brazilian social documentary photographer.

The Mines of Serra Pelada

The mines of Serra Pelada is a photography essay about the working conditions of the gold miners in Serra Pelada, Brazil. The photo essay records the appalling working conditions of the mines. It also pays tribute to the perseverance and resilience of the mine workers.  

About 50,000 workers were employed to work on this gold mine. Without machinery, the miners manually made craters from which the gold was mined and would use rickety ladders to climb up and down the mine shaft.

Sahel: The end of the road

For Sahel: The end of the road, Salgado spent 15 months working on this project about the drought stricken belt that runs from West (Mali) to East (sudan) Africa called the Sahel. This region suffered extreme drought causing devastating suffering and loss of life for millions. Salgado documented the people in refugee camps who were trying to escape the drought and its effects.

 

Sahel: The end of the road

 Salgado has been accepted as an artist, showing his work in museums, galleries, travelling shows around the world.

However, his images although reporting on the world and formally beautiful, pose questions about ethics and the boundaries between aesthetics and politics. 

What does the beautification of tragedy communicate? Does it anesthetize?

In documentary photography are issues of political struggle, poverty, tragedy positioned for "comfortable contemplation?" 

Is the aesthetization of these issues less authentic or politically valuable? Or can beauty be a tool for a call to action?

Any kind of representation involves an aestheticization of the subject. What is the question of the author of the image? Is the question not whether to aestheticize but how to aestheticize?

Quote from Salgado:
Making a film is probably the wrong way to do things. So, probably, is putting on an exhibition. But I sincerely want to know what is correct. Because, if it is correct, I believe that I must go and do it. I believe we have a responsibility in the time in which we are living to provoke a discussion, to provoke a debate, to ask questions. A debate everybody should participate in. If we want to survive as a species, we must find a proper direction in which to go; we must choose another way. Because what I saw in these pictures is not the proper way. It's not the correct way, the one we have chosen.