The Militant Photography Of Sebastião Salgado
Before opening its shores to seaside tourism, the small island of Favignana used to be economically depend on the practice of tuna fishing and its ancient techniques.
The cover of the article, shot in 1991 by the Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado, portrays a group of the island’s fishermen, which - months after having carefully displaced huge fishing nets miles from the coast - returns to sea in late spring to capitalize on the season’s captures. The concentration builds up as they patiently close in on the chamber of death, the inner section of the nets, ready to blow the final strike with their harpoons: a moment known as mattanza.
The intensification of tuna fishing off the coast of Morocco and Eastern Spain has drastically reduced the population of tuna reaching the Western coast of Sicily, making the island’s millenary practice a story of the past.
The fishermen’s image is an extract of Workers - Salgado’s photographic essay on the transformations of manual labour across the globe - exploring the disappearance of century-old forms of human activity and documenting the birth of new mechanisms of production.
This celebrative manifesto of the working class shines a light to a world still rooted in nineteenth century industrialization and exploitation dynamics: from the sugar fields in Cuba, to the steel plants of the Soviet Union, and from the oil wells of Kuwait to the ship breaking yards in Bangladesh, Salgado shows us men physically transforming the world, fighting against the elements, natural and societal.
I WANTED TO PAY HOMAGE TO ALL THE MEN AND WOMEN WHO BUILT THE WORLD AROUND US. AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE INDUSTRIAL ERA
– S. SALGADO
Economics and politics have played a central role in the photographer’s life and gaze.
Born in 1944 to a family of farmers in the state of Minas Gerais, Salgado would be profoundly influenced both by the tranquillity of his childhood and the political turmoil he became exposed to when moving to Victoria, a coastal city north of Rio, to pursue secondary education. At that time, Brazil had just started its process of economic development, and Salgado - driven by his will to understand the dynamics of modernity - would decide to approach the study of economics.
His militancy in leftist associations coincided with the establishment of the military dictatorship, which led him in 1964 to search political asylum in France. Here in Europe, he would continue his studies and embark in a promising career as an economist. He had not yet decided to abandon it after discovering his vocation and passion for photography, precisely during one of his travels to Africa on behalf of the International Coffee Organization.
As a photojournalist, Salgado would spend years between Africa and South America, offering the world testaments of the droughts of the Sahel region, the hungers of North-western Brazil, the Congo Wars and its mass migrations. The photographer - in its narration and glorification of humanity - often captured in its most fragile and marginalized expressions, never assumes an emotionally distant or morally superior perspective.
He is always part of the scene, part of the community, part of the struggle, part of the narrative. Salgado’s works are charged with the responsibility to provide a testament, to spread the acknowledgment of a precise and persistent condition which was left in silence.
The project Genesis marked a shift in the photographer’s approach. Nature became the primary object of representation after the human sphere had occupied the interest and passionate research of the first Salgado. Genesis is the product of eight years of explorations of the uncontaminated landscapes and ecosystems of our planet, from the barren sands of the Sahara Desert to the hostile mountain chains of the Yukon territory. This archive, manifesto of a primal and archaic Earth, denounces the modern man’s alienation from the natural world and his disregards for its fate.
The philosophical premises of Genesis will also underlie Salgado’s following project Amazônia, a photographical chronicle on the Amazon basin and its forest, rivers and indigenous communities. The photographer’s return to Brazil will also coincide with his vocal and strong opposition to Bolsonaro’s policies on deforestation and on the ostracization of indigenous communities from the national political life, endangering both the Amazon’s ecosystem and the functioning of the Brazilian democratic process.
Last year, I was at the Amazônia exhibit at the MAXXI, in Rome. What I found to be most captivating, was the role played by every single image in constructing a story both celebrating and informative. While the aerial landscapes and the other nature-centred images provided a first-hand look at the forest’s climatic and biological dynamics, the many portraits shot within the different indigenous settlements returned an accurate depiction of the heterogeneous socio-cultural fabric. The images managed to create a powerful emphatic relation between viewers and subjects, and were able to draw closer people who in their daily life felt unaffected by the Amazon’s endangerment, or unresponsible for its conservation.
This overlook at the life and works of Sebastião Salgado ends back at the cover of the article: the photograph of the fishermen of Favignana. The latter is, in fact, part of the photographer’s latest exhibit, comprised of images taken from the multitude of his books: Aqua Mater.
