Teller of human stories
A Brazilian gold mine as a hellishly beautiful pit, strung with rickety ladders and crawling with human worker bees. An Indian train station so unbearably crowded that a stream of people pressed between two railway cars gushes into a flood. A ravishingly gorgeous Ecuadorean landscape, cut by a long, sad line of women trudging to market.
Sebastiao Salgado’s moody black-and-white pictures of the world’s poor and oppressed make a visual epic of human drama and travail.
To his admirers, Salgado is much more than a documentary photographer. He is an extraordinary artist who “invokes a poetic sense of struggles so profound that ... the forces of light and darkness, of life and death, are summoned,” in the words of one scholar.
His work has found a huge audience at art museums and galleries as well as in print, but the Paris-based photographer has no artistic pretensions. He arrives at the Peter Fetterman Gallery in Santa Monica -- where a 25-year survey of his work is on view -- neatly dressed in jeans, a dark blue shirt and black sweater vest, and gets down to business. Soft-spoken but intensely engaged in his work, he plops down on a comfortable couch, fixes his pale blue eyes on his interviewer and talks.
“I made these as documents,” he says of the works on display. “I didn’t do them as art.” Like objects that were made to serve a utilitarian or ceremonial purpose but are now perceived as art, documentary photographs may become art over time, he says. But they don’t start out that way.
“I shoot hundreds of pictures to tell a story,” he says. “They go to magazines, humanitarian organizations, wherever they are wanted. If people want to buy them and put them in their homes, why not? The point is to look at them and see what they tell.”
Born in 1944 on a farm in Brazil, Salgado was trained as an economist and worked for the Brazilian Ministry of Finance and in the investment department of the London-based International Coffee Organization. In the early ‘70s, he began experimenting with a camera that his wife, architect Lelia Wanick Salgado, had purchased for her work. Intrigued, he took the camera on a business trip to Africa.
“When I went back to London, the pictures gave me 10 times more pleasure than the economic reports,” he says. “I discovered another way to relate to people.”
By 1973 Salgado had taken up a new profession, one grounded in what had gone before. Growing up in a relatively poor country and studying economics laid the foundation for his passion: photographing social movements.
His life experiences are at the core of his imagery, he says. And his grasp of global economics has prepared him to interpret inequities in human terms: “This has given me a very nice tool of analysis, to understand what’s going on.”
But the pictures themselves are always a surprise. “This is a craft, not an industry,” he says.
Over the last three decades, Salgado has photographed independence movements in Angola and Rhodesia, famine in the Sahel region of Africa, Kuwait’s burning oil fields, Vietnamese boat people and the troubles of war-torn Bosnia.
He also has pursued global themes that have led to big picture books. “Workers: An Archaeology of the Industrial Age,” published in 1993, is the result of an eight-year effort to portray the last gasp of manual labor. “Migrations: Humanity in Transition,” published in 2000, is a panorama of displaced people, made over seven years in 40 countries. A new book, to be released next year with a series of exhibitions, will document efforts to eradicate polio.
To do these projects, Salgado says, “you don’t just go somewhere for two hours, get a picture and come back. You spend time, live with the people and understand their reality, which has its own speed. If you come with your own speed and push and push and push, you don’t see what’s in front of you.”
Nonetheless, he has a daunting schedule, and it involves more than photography. Three years ago he and his wife founded the nonprofit Instituto Terra to replant the Atlantic rain forest in their native Brazil. Since then, with the help of thousands of local people and worldwide contributions, 300,000 trees have been planted on a former wasteland.
“The human degradation I photograph is linked to environmental degradation,” Salgado says. “My job is to speak about it and raise money.” The night before the opening of his show, he did exactly that at a Westside fund-raiser. Two days later, he took off to spread the word in San Francisco.
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Sebastiao Salgado
Where: Peter Fetterman Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica.
When: Tuesdays-Saturdays, 11 a.m.-4 p.m.
Ends: Nov. 2.
Price: Free.
Contact: (310) 453-6463.
Also: The photographs can be viewed on the gallery’s Web site, www.peterfetterman.com.