From his first visual report in a newspaper to his giant solo exhibitions, Sebastião Salgado has shown how everything he recorded revealed, even accentuated, the power of a medium he used with eloquence. Or grandiloquence, according to some critics who saw these black and white images as more of a tragic spectacle than a true story. For them, Salgado exploited these anonymous extras by staging them without denouncing any responsibility. Thus, a fatality is imposed that can move visitors but without any political impact, a visual impasse, therefore.
Even though he was aware of these criticisms, Salgado never wanted, at least during our meetings, to respond directly, preferring to position himself as a man among others, a traveler “on loan to France.” “Our history is 6,000 years old. It is the history of a group. Individuality is nonsense.”
Saturday, December 3, 1988, Place Jules-Ferry, Montrouge, France.
The studio door opened, and Robert Doisneau appeared, discreetly elegant. He had agreed to meet Sebastião Salgado about his exhibition at the Grande Halle de La Villette on his Renault years (1934-1939). He considered himself a photographer with a sedentary streak, which is half true; he was not a homebody, curiosity was his driving force, he knew France like the back of his hand. Salgado, on the other hand, was a migratory bird, constantly traveling the world in search of “those who built it (…). A tribute to today’s workers, to the working class.”
We had all morning, in the afternoon, Sebastião Salgado had to move. Salgado was then a young photographer from Magnum (he was 44 years old), and Doisneau, one of the pillars of Rapho, future author of a book with a fabulous title and content, To the Imperfect of the Objective (Belfond, 1989).
Their interview appeared on January 3, 1989: three full pages with their portrait opening the Culture pages of the newspaper Libération, where I worked for 30 years. It was Sylvie Bouvier, an attentive iconographer, who had the idea of choosing a neighborhood photographer, based in Montrouge (Hauts-de-Seine), a stone’s throw from Gentilly (Val-de-Marne) where Robert Doisneau was born on April 14, 1912.
The portrait, of great sobriety, was very likeness. Stunning, Doisneau would say. It wass signed P. Roux/Idèle Photo. Sebastião, his hand on Doisneau’s shoulder, still had his musketeer’s mustache.
What did they talk about?
A Basque beret as a shutter.
Oil plates from the Renault factory.
About the Zaporozhye factory in Ukraine, which produced the smallest Soviet car, the ugliest in the world and guaranteed to be full of mechanical glitches.
About Usinor-Sollac blast furnace number 6 in Dunkirk, fully computer-controlled.
Hungarians from Paris: Brassaï and Kertész.
Young photographers who lost their way and thought they’re painters.
About photography, as the wandering of a butterfly.
Photography as a definitive and established profession.
Life magazine’s staff, with the “pif-paf” guys.
About Boubat, in the stars and not under the stars.
About Blaise Cendrars and The Suburbs of Paris.
Astrophysicists, more reassuring than priests.
About the Southern Cross, a familiar constellation for Brazilians.
Jet lag, the desire to go home, to La Paz at 4,200 meters above sea level, to the Lot, the most beautiful department in France, to Brazil, 17 times the size of France.
About the French, who are mostly selfish with themselves, not with foreigners.
Soporific slide shows.
And, in its entirety, between two fits of laughter, this wonderful exchange between two partners for a day who are totally in sync, living symbols of an artisanal photography…
Salgado: “I love the folkloric side of the French. In Brazil, they say that France is a country where everyone is intelligent.”
Doisneau: “You shouldn’t tell the French this. They’re already so annoying, so full of patriotism. Cendrars told me about Brazil. He told me fabulous stories of boats stranded in trees. It might not have been true, but it’s beautiful…”
Salgado: “There are some fantastic stories. My wife’s father was a boa catcher, which he then sold to zoos and circuses. There were several of them, a dozen, who went into the jungle. They would first discover where the big snake was sleeping, and the day the big snake had a good meal, they would go and attack it. Imagine, Robert, a boa hidden in its tree by the river and three or four men determined to get it. The snake would dive into the water, they would cling to it. The boa would come up, it can’t stay at the bottom for very long, like men, and while those four were fighting, the others would rest. Then those who had just confronted the boa would go to sleep and the others would replace it. It was teamwork. After a few days, the boa was exhausted, it could no longer stand up, and the men would catch it.”
Doisneau collapsed with laughter. He couldn’t speak, as if the boa constrictor had hypnotized him. Then he said, “Three eights against a snake, what a great idea!”
Winter 1995, Quai de Valmy, Paris, France.
Some time later, in the winter of 1995, for issue 12 of the magazine L’Insensé, we found ourselves again with Sebastião Salgado, “the reporter of the twenty-first century”, according to Robert Doisneau. It was a majestic publication, the format of the magazine lent itself to it, Lélia Wanick Salgado and Françoise Piffard were our contacts for the editing part.
We met at his new agency (created in 1994), Amazonas Images, near the Canal Saint-Martin in Paris. Sebastião hadn’t changed. Between two time zones… He’d just arrived from Australia, and soon he’d be flying to Shanghai. He still had his blue Santa Claus eyes and that enchanting voiced consonants that gave the impression that we were sailing on the open sea…
Hands in his pockets, he edited one of the contact sheets of a “phenomenal” epic, as he liked to say. An investigation into the movement of populations around the world. Migrants. Population boom. Refugees. Growth. Fractures. Xenophobia. Privileges. Solidarity… “By the middle of the next century, we will be eleven billion human beings. Eleven billion when we are already five and a half billion…”
What did we talk about?
About his father, Sebastião, a pharmacist who, with 12 mules, began transporting coffee, the only export commodity, before settling as a farmer near Aimorès, in the province of Minas Gerais, not far from the Rio Doce, the sweet river. Sebastião was born on February 8, 1944, in Conceição, near Aimorès, surrounded by forests and logging, under a tropical sun. “I was born in the backlight. Ever since I was little, I could see my father’s face in the shadows. (…) My mother, Decia, is from Ukraine. With her, everything has a solution, you just have to believe in it. You can transform the whole world. My father taught me honesty. He was a strict man, he never told a lie, not even joking.”
About his first trip with his mother, after a 26-hour train journey, to Belo Horizonte. He was 11 years old. “We crossed the Valley of Steel. My God! You can’t imagine… There were these men in the middle of the night, dressed in asbestos suits, standing in front of cathedrals of fire… For me, the most immense thing that existed on the globe was the church of Aimores and there, it was… it was phenomenal… Later, when I was studying in Vittoria, every Sunday, I went to the port. I watched the boats coming from Denmark, from Japan… I devoured these gringos with my eyes with enormous curiosity. I passed my baccalaureate, I dreamed of being an economist.”
About his commitment: “We too, in 1968, had very tough student movements in São Paulo, but since it’s the Third World, we forget to talk about it… It was real militancy, not theoretical. It was your life itself. We were all cells of a whole body. (…) Brazil is a human animal.”
Liberalism – which was everywhere – like suffering and exclusion: “People are shocked, but it’s our system, we chose it… Bombay is, for me, the city of hope. They don’t complain, they don’t cry, they have confidence. Here, we feel guilty about consuming goods that all of humanity has produced. I come from a country where we are aware that our work goes elsewhere.”
About his ethics: “I am not a detector of conscience, I am simply a vector of universal memory: I give to see. I am not an enlightened one, I belong to a human tribe. It is not me nor you who detects the danger, it is obvious, it is glaring. Humanitarianism, this humanitarianism that critics criticize so much, is not a defeat, it is a conscience. (…) Approaching others is a magnificent moment, a communication, a passage from one man to another. They give you authorization, their agreement even in destitution. Yes, even in distress. It is a superiority complex to believe that we are stealing images, that we are stealing faces.”
Autumn 2013, MEP, rue de Fourcy, Paris, France.
He was soon going to be 70, can you believe it? For the Sunday Times, he was “the world’s greatest photojournalist,” for others, a trafficker of good feelings. For me, a sincere man.
We met at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, which housed 245 black and white images on four floors under the compelling title, Genesis. Latest news: his eldest son, Juliano, was preparing a documentary about him with Wim Wenders ( The Salt of the Earth, released in 2014), and it was his wife, Lélia, who prepared and followed the Genesis epic, an eight-year journey around a world at the dawn of humanity. On site, Jacques Barthélémy, a high-mountain guide, sometimes accompanied him.
Genesis is a tribute to our “fabulous” land, still full of resources. In Ethiopia, he walked on virgin territories, and frightened children who had never seen a white man with blue eyes. In the Galapagos, he spoke to a tortoise who had perhaps met a certain Darwin. He had to learn digital technology, “which was much more difficult than climbing mountains.” He never got discouraged, since he was never alone, sometimes connected to trees and plants, sometimes to water, even if it was perfectly frozen. The only certainty in the face of Genesis and this primitive world that he brought out of the invisible: “If I add up all the photographs I took during these eight years, maybe it doesn’t represent more than a second, no, it’s true, am I serious?”
Sebastião Salgado explained how comforting Genesis was, as he, in the wake of his economics studies, tried to document social and political chaos, from drought in the Sahel to populations displaced by war, from landless peasants to refugee camps. Wherever he was, everything seemed dark, but not necessarily tragic, as in his most fantastical visual story, about the Serra Pelada gold mine in the Brazilian state of Pará, haunted by mud-covered garimpeiros. 50,000 men, 70 meters underground, obsessed with an unshareable fantasy: being rich.
Self-indulgent staging or subjective reportage? Salgado: “That’s the great power of the photographer, to take time as it is, in the light of one’s own history. I’m a vagabond, I’m never where I’m expected, but always elsewhere… The curiosity to see and the desire to understand have never left me. I’ll soon be seventy, and I’m still happy to be one of those photographers whose life is both outside and outside. The gaze destroys nothing, it’s my privilege.”
