Sebastião Salgado
Brazilian, 1944- (active France)
Wood Delivery Men, Eastern Sierra Madre, México, 1980
gelatin silver print
9 1/2 x 11 3/4 in.
SBMA, Gift of Arthur B. Steinman
2000.50.82
Salgado with his 35mm camera photographed by Jose Saramago
"What I want is the world to remember the problems and the people I photograph. What I want is to create a discussion about what is happening around the world and to provoke some debate with these pictures. Nothing more than this. I don't want people to look at them and appreciate the light and the palate of tones. I want them to look inside and see what the pictures represent, and the kind of people I photograph."
- Sebastiao Salgado - Excerpts from an interview with Sebastiao Salgado by Ken Lassiter, Photographer's Forum
POSTSCRIPT
This image was once titled Mexico,1980.
COMMENTS
Salgado was born and raised on a large cattle farm in Brazil. He was trained as an economist and spent time working with the World Bank before turning to photography in 1973. Initially he was a free-lance photojournalist, capturing news events sometimes with a single image. He spent seven years doing self-initiated and generally self-financed travels to remote villages of Latin America to explore and determine his roots. These journeys culminated in his first book Autre Ameriques (Other Americas). He tried to capture images of the less fortunate and those who helped them, such as the priests who administered to the villagers.
This affinity to the poor reflected his work in Africa with the World Bank, trying to bring economic aid to peoples in the Third World. He found greater satisfaction in depicting their lives in photographs, and his first reporting, for the World Council of Churches, was about starvation in Africa. He said that the “picture is not made by the photographer, the picture is more good or less good in function of the relationship that you have with the people that you photograph.” On assignments he would take a bus rather than rent a car because he did not want to be know as a “guy with a car” or a rich guy; rather he wanted to be “with the people”.
Salgado compares his photographic strategy with the philosophy of 35 mm photography espoused by Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment”—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. Salgado feels that he must go further to become those he photographs, or at the very least to understand the existence of those he depicts.
Salgado’s documentaries are inspired by his own spiritual search and reclamation of self. He may live in Paris, but he returns to the people and scenes of his childhood and bridges that gap between the more economically developed peoples and the less developed.
Transcribed from the SBMA docent files by Ralph Wilson, 2013
SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS
Considered one of the most important social documentary photographers working today, Sebastião Salgado has traveled the world photographing images of the dispossessed. His interests in labor, migration, and the trials of war have established his reputation as both photographer and activist. Despite the documentary nature of his photography, Salgado has a profound ability to aestheticize his subject matter, elevating the mundane to the majestic.
In this image, men carry wood through the hills of the Eastern Sierra Madre in Mexico. The misty mountains serve as an ethereal backdrop for the men, who gracefully carry bundles of wood that resemble coffins from distance. With heavy loads upon their backs, the figures appear both cruciform in their shape and Christ-like in their burden.
- Myth and Materiality: Latin American Art from the Permanent Collection, 1930-1990 (2013)