“VWe are if, looking at the same photographs, let’s try the same feelings. “Virginia Woolf
Sebastião Salgado, the great Brazilian photographer, must have thought of this phrase by Virginoa Woolf when he decided to create images capable of arousing feelings, reflections and indignation.
And starting from himself, “Photography is the language with which you can show people what you have seen”accompanied us in every corner of the world to show us the great injustices that make the human condition painful.
My generation
My photographic generation loved it. He was the master of travel and discovery.
All of us, I speak in the name of everyone without asking for permission, followed his companies that were nothing more than the only real great undertaking in which we believed in those years: photographing to discover the world and show it to become aware.
I was a photography student when I saw his first alarming images of the dramatic famine of the Sahel. The book was entitled Sahel.’homme en dentiesse (Sahel. The man in difficulty), Prism presses – pour mèdecins sans frontières. Hunger and thirsty faces on the precipice of death. A gloomy and dramatic representation of the afflicted and ignored humanity, in which scar Anonymous bodies looked at us in the eyes by that Africa that the greedy West had plundered and made forever. It was 1986.
For my generation, ’68 belonged to history and the 77 train had already passed. We lacked the rebellion, we had the ashes of terrorism in hand while we observed the race towards wild and inhuman capitalism. We read everything that was possible but the present, before the network, was not so grasped. Photography seemed revolutionary to us.
Victims and guilty
We went to via Veneto to the international newsstand to read the newspapers of images and words that came from all continents. There I have to have seen those women and children for the first time, the cripples of the drought photographed by Salgado. I didn’t know who the photographer was and not even who were those black ghosts, but I understood that that photograph could make the difference, contained the power of the denunciation and, with the naivety of that season of life, I was sure that he could have saved the whole humanity, the victims and the culprits. I had decided, Salgado would have been my hero, the Ulysses who would have guided me towards the light of the discovery of the planets of the planet, a prophetic detector of the unknown who believes in consciousness and entrusts photography the task of waking it up. Precursor of the consequences of the disastrous choices of men against men. Seventeen years after seeing the images of that work, Susan Sontag in In front of the pain of others He would have explained to all of us how to look and what to understand.
Schiavitù, environmental disasters, consequences of wars, all that man does against himself and against his habitat is Salgado’s photography.
His work speaks to politicians, governments, armies and speaks above all to us to make us aware spectators.
The chapters of his work
Of the 600 wells of the Kuwait burned in 1991 by Iraqi soldiers to block the advance of the Americans in the Gulf War would have said: “I have never seen, before or after that moment, such an enormous unnatural disaster.”
Now that he died, at 81 in Paris he had elected as his second home after Brazil so loved and defended, I think of this man who has traveled in more than 100 countries, photographed for more than 50 annI, facing the great crises of the planet and restoring them as an epic story. I think this was his intent, to offer us a visual story of what we are and at the same time warn us for what we could lose. The world is at stake, the only one known to date, the one that only if we know how to protect will it be able to survive with us.
He had studied economics and, choosing photography as a means of expressive, somehow he had drawn from his formation, careful to never ignore the economic and political causes, not underestimating the events that intersecting themselves often become tragedies in the tragedy.
The hand of manContrast 1996 (Workers, in the original edition of 1993) is A colossal work of 400 pages on human work, made in 6 years through 26 countries, translated into 7 languages, exhibited in museums around the world, a milestone for all those projects that will then be called “long -term”. He has always been long -terman encyclopedic popularizer, regardless of the time it takeshis path leaves us the history of humanity declined in great chapters.
On the wayLeonardo/Contrasto, 2000 is the project on migratory movements, on which he will return after 16 years by publishing ExodusPaschen 2016, After traveling for 6 years, in 35 countries by expanding and updating the now unstoppable and global wave of the new human race, migrants.
In the furious years of photographic passion, to discover the world in 35mm, my generation was divided between Salgado and Nachwey. A dualism similar to what a few decades earlier had opposed other generations: those of the Beatles and Rolling Stones. I have never had doubts, I preferred Salgado and the Beatles.
Genesis, or the wonder of the earth
One of the last great bequests of this immense singer of humanity is GenesisPaschen 2013, the project dedicated to the immense and varigrated beauty of the planet. Beautiful images, so perfect that we have often criticized them. Too perfect in the era of digital manipulation. The information ceased to be a client of visual knowledge, but Salgado continued his mission, faithful only to himself and his style.
There is a continuity in all his photography, he has only perfected and inevitably aestheticized. But the general public followed him faithful, from one chapter to the other in his history of the stories of the world by putting himself in line in front of the entrance of his exhibitions.
An invincible partnership
HAll his life with his wife, Lélia Wanick Salgadowith him the architect of the projects and curator of his exhibitions.
“I work together with an exceptional partner: my wife. The most important thing about my life is the day I met my wife, in 1964. Since then, we have analyzed and discussed together every story I photographed. We shared the same ethical and political motivations that have given birth to my stories”. A partnership that all of us, photographers and not, have envied.
A great work of hope
“He sowed hope where there was devastation and gave birth to the belief that environmental rebirth is also a deep act of love towards humanity“.” He writes the Earth Institute, founded by him with his wife, in the obituary that appears on social media.
Yes, that’s just like that, he gave hope. Also to that generation of mine, orphaned of dreams, bottled in those horrible 80s that we would have called the ebb and then in the 90s who announced the end of the millennium and a cathartic revolution. The web would arrive. Spassedi and naive, overwhelmed by the new digital era, we have hung up on social networks. Salgado instead continued and seeking throughout the planet the beauty and fragility to warn us and invite us to act.
An environmental photographer, anthropologist, politician, activist, I could add many other adjectives to describe .. While I write I think he has kicked off that vein of humanist photography, no longer the photojournalism of Robert Capa and more recently of James Nachwey, but the photography that deals with the human being in his social and existential difficulties.
In Salgado he is never interested in grasping the moment, but the story.
If one day on this tormented planet the aliens arrive and they want to know of us, curious about our now extinct species, for them the work of Sebastião Salgado will be indispensable.
I woman © RESERVED REPRODUCTION