The photographs of slavery that Sebastião Salgado found in the gold mines of Brazil
Color. Brightness. Modernity. This was the holy trinity of the press in the 1980s, with major international magazines investing millions in the conversion to color pages.
So when Sebastião Salgado explained to Neil Burgess (who had just been appointed director of Magnum in London in 1986) that he intended to dedicate the next few years to photographing only in black and white the lives of poor and exploited workers in 42 locations around the world, he threw up his hands. Commercially, the Brazilian photographer's project had all the makings of a disaster.
A few months later, Salgado called him to say that he had just returned from Brazil, where he had decided to begin the project that would give rise to the book Trabalho . Now, he said, he needed Magnum to sell some of those photographs so that he could continue on to the 41 destinations he still had left.
“They asked how much the work would cost and I asked for double the most expensive portfolio that had ever been sold by Magnum… They immediately offered me a hand: 'Ok'”
A box containing 40 photographs printed at 24 x 30 cm was delivered to the Magnum office, and Burgess was dazzled, as he later told the British Journal of Photography in 2019. He called Salgado, who had suggested trying to get published in Granta , and told him that one of the big magazines would buy the story. He thought it unlikely because the Serra Pelada had already been photographed by others, including Magnum’s correspondent in Brazil, Miguel Rio Branco. But they all took color photos, spending just a day or two recording the spectacle of 50,000 men searching for gold in the mud, in the middle of the Amazon.
Salgado, on the other hand, took black-and-white photographs and lived for four weeks with the “workers” in a “shack”, following every phase of that colossal work, listening to them talk about their dreams and the monsters that tormented them.
This immersion in the subjects portrayed has always been an essential condition for the Brazilian's work, even when he was photographing for news agencies (and in color), where he began his career, at the end of the 1970s. In 1983, during the great famine in Ethiopia, for example, he settled in a camp for malnourished people and criticized journalists who barely had any contact with the reality they intended to portray – he saw 34 reporting teams arrive and leave during the ten days he spent there.
“The patience and concentration needed to stay in one place, to try to see beyond first impressions, to force yourself to look at a subject in different ways, in different lights, and then go back and look again, is essential,” says the former Magnum director, who, an hour after receiving Salgado’s photographs, was walking into the office of the Sunday Times art editor.
Michael Rand, a pioneer in introducing color into weekend supplements, would be perhaps the worst possible person to sell a black-and-white portfolio to, and Neil Burgess had kept quiet about the work he was going to show, fearing that Rand would not even agree to see it.
For a few moments, after laying out some of the photographs from the Brazilian gold rush on the table, an uncomfortable silence fell over the room and Burgess feared the worst. But when he looked at Michael Rand’s face, he realized that it was “a good silence”, almost reverential. He had rarely felt from international editors that respect that is mixed with enchantment, like a kind of spell that leads to total surrender. “They asked how much it would cost and I asked for double the price of the most expensive portfolio that had ever been sold by Magnum… They immediately offered me their hand: ‘Okay’.”
The reaction was similar at the New York Times Magazine, when photo editor Peter Howe showed Salgado’s photos to the paper’s management. “In my entire career, I have never seen editors react to a piece like that,” Howe wrote last month, referring to the new book edition of the story, published by Taschen.
The morning after publication, Magnum's phones were ringing off the hook. Editors from all over the world wanted to buy the photographs, and from then on, Sebastião Salgado had guaranteed funding to travel the world and publish, report by report, the portfolio that, years later, would be included in the work Trabalho .
The portrait of the slavery to which those men were subjected would come to guarantee his freedom as an author. Anyone who saw the photographs of the anthill of men covered in mud in that gold mine never forgot the name of the person behind the camera.
Salgado also kept forever what he felt in Serra Pelada. “There I had a torn and definitive vision of the human beast: 50 thousand creatures sculpted in mud and dreams,” he wrote in the introduction to Trabalho .
“All that could be heard was the sound of human noise, muffled murmurs and shouts, and the noise of shovels and hoes moved by human hands, no sound of machinery.” In a place where firearms, alcohol and women were forbidden, “there was an unspeakable need for everything, for affection, for human warmth. There was constant danger and a life without consolation. Slaves to illusion, turning over the earth.”
There I had a torn and definitive vision of the human beast: 50 thousand creatures sculpted in mud and dreams.
Sebastian Salty
Only by remaining and gaining the trust of the men that Salgado intended to portray was it possible to capture on film the hope and violence latent in that crater with unreal contours, from another world or other times.
Only then was it possible to see beyond the mud that covered those thousands of bodies and learn unique stories, such as that of the union leader who led the homosexual miners’ wing. “He was a brave man, respected by everyone, and he dreamed of finding gold and going to Paris,” recalls Salgado. His greatest dream was to have silicone breasts implanted. “No one is like the French for this type of operation. The breasts in Paris are the most beautiful in the world,” he said.
This miner probably never left Pará, like the vast majority of “peões” who lost years of their lives there chasing a mirage. The Serra Pelada “dried up” shortly afterwards, and from those times all that remains are legends about nuggets the size of cabbages – and the images that Salgado gave us.
Sebastião Salgado went back to the 400 rolls of film he brought back from Serra Pelada in 1987 to select the 300 images (31 of which are previously unpublished) that make up the new book Gold , published in November 2019 by Taschen, in three versions: one for the general public (€50) and two for collectors. The XXL edition costs €800 and each book is numbered and signed by the author; the Art Edition , in an earth-toned box with a printed photograph signed by the photographer, cost €5,000 (it is now sold out). Published in several languages, the book has a trilingual edition (Portuguese, Italian and Spanish), with a background text by journalist Alan Riding, former international correspondent for the New York Times .
At the same time, an exhibition with 56 previously unpublished images was also created, which opened in São Paulo, Brazil. There is still no information about its passage through Portugal, although there are already dates for its presentation in London, Tallinn and Stockholm.
Sebastião Salgado graduated in Economics, but his passion for photography led him to pursue a career as a photojournalist in 1973. He worked for the agencies Sigma and Gamma and, in 1979, joined Magnum. He wanted to know and make the world known, understand people's motivations, and document a society in change – and that is what he has done for the last 40 years. After Trabalho, which began with photographs in Serra Pelada, he dedicated several years to the books Terra, Êxodos, África and Génesis , among other cause-related projects. From photographic activism, he moved on to effective activism in 1998, when he founded the Instituto Terra (with his wife, Lélia Wanick Salgado), promoting environmental education and the recovery of the Atlantic Forest and the Amazon forests. He won the World Press Photo and the Prince of Asturias Award, among dozens of other awards, and in 2017 he was appointed chair number 1 of the four available for photographers at the French Academy of Fine Arts. He is 75 years old and, despite having homes in Minas Gerais and Paris, he is almost always on the road.
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