MAGICAL REALISM

Photography continuously evolves in the face of changing historical, technological, social and cultural contexts. Thus, the highly specialized photographer of the mid 19th century, an alchemist who carried with them a chest with lenses and laboratory equipment, has given way to anyone who carries the latest iPhone in their pocket. Radical changes in production conditions and in the ways of looking have revolutionized the canon of photography and the figure of the photographer in society. At the heart of this canon is Sebastião Salgado.

It is difficult to separate the man from the photographer. His almost messianic stance toward photography, combined with his technical, aesthetic and political choices, have all contributed to building Salgado’s image as a hero – an explorer of worlds, capable of making difficult and dangerous journeys to places that are almost unreachable in order to save those who are invisible or to give them a voice, from his favored perspective. His work is a saga. His name has always been synonymous with grandeur and integrity. Throughout his prolific career, his photographic work could also count with the narrative strength of his discourse – the words of a storyteller from Minas Gerais, his very perceptive and fascinating interviews. He was tireless in his search for the best image, which he believed was capable of inducing empathy in the viewer towards what he portrayed.

In building this visual rhetoric, he extended the language of documentary to a thin division, between staging and snapshot, in a form of magical realism. In an animistic world, the elements of nature become protagonists and seem to imprint intentionality on the scenes: a ray of light coming from the sky gives life to a way of looking; the dramatic contrast of the clouds recalls a Biblical scene; his use of black and white creates a microcosm in itself. Salgado said that his father loved to climb to the highest part of the family’s farm to await the rain. To his right, it rained, to his left , the sun shone. In Salgado’s words: “It was like the beginning of days, as if I was living through Genesis. This inheritance has become part of me.”

During his fi ve-decade career, he received hundreds of awards, mounted countless exhibitions and published many books. He was the best-known Brazilian photographer outside Brazil. He did not begin his career in his country of birth; he fi rst emerged in the public eye in the United States and lived most of his life in France. He counted on the support of his wife, Lélia Wanick Salgado, who acted as curator and the great manager of his career. He was an intellectual, had a degree in economics, and always emphasized the importance of university education to understand the context of images. He died on May 23, 2025 from complications arising from malaria, which he had contracted on one of his photographic adventures.

I had the opportunity to interview him in Paris in 2021. I hadn’t anticipated the impact his physical presence would have on me – his serene and rhythmic speech seemed to suspend time. We didn’t talk about specific photos. Salgado spoke of his travels and feelings, recalling his childhood, adolescence and adult life lived on seven continents. He would pause, gazing unseeingly into the distance, as if he was searching his memory for the best phrase, the exact word. It was impossible not to be enchanted with his clear, ocean-like gaze, which made everything farsighted. Never did the words of Roland Barthes and Walter Benjamin about the relationship between the photograph and the word make so much sense. Both authors, each in his own way, saw a photograph as a message without a code: for Barthes, it was for words to elucidate what was not obvious in the image; for Benjamin, the photograph should resort to captions to broaden the experience of the viewer. Similarly, Salgado’s enchanting speech enhanced the power of his photographs.

However, just as this work cannot be reduced to mere documentary, it should not be seen  only through the prism of magic and fascination either. It is essential to analyze the legacy of this hero-photographer from a critical perspective, above all at a time when new technology of production and sharing of images as well as decolonial studies are placing photography under intense political scrutiny, questioning the perspective (“place of speech”) of photographers, and rapidly extending a tendency to self-representation. Does the death of Sebastian Salgado also imply the end of an era?

THE LIMITS TO THE PAIN OF THE OTHER

Like Salgado, many photographers round the world have contributed to this tradition of “heroic” photographic practice embodied by the foreign gaze that scrutinizes the world with journalistic or anthropological interest when representing it. For example, Henri  Cartier-Bresson, the French photographer, was the first Westerner to register the fall of the Kuomintang government and the rise of the Popular Republic of China, a historic event witnessed by the photographer from December 1948 to September 1949. Cartier-Bresson went on to found the prestigious Magnum photographic agency, in which Salgado took part, that represents like no other institution the idea of the documentary photography that we call heroic here. In Brazil, important European photographers such as Claudia Andujar, who registered the indigenous Amazonian Yanomami people, and Pierre Verger, who photographed the religious rituals of African descendants in Bahia, also fit this model of photography where the vulnerable or the invisible only become visible in Western eyes through the lenses of professional photographers. 

Salgado’s photos often enable us to see the marginalized aspects of the globalized world, mirroring historical issues of social, political and economic background. These images confront us with extreme human suffering – like suppurating wounds – while succeeding in composing them in a pleasing and aesthetically attractive way. His first destination as a photographer was Africa, which he had first visited in the 1970s when he was working as an administrator with the International Coffee Organization (ICO), where he was bemused by the hunger and exodus he witnessed. In Other Americas (1982), he wanted to encounter the heart of Latin America that had existed in his imagination during his self-exile in Europe or,

in his words, carry out “a type of archaeology into a historical moment for the rural communities of Latin America.” In Workers (1992), Salgado maps the exploitation of the work force worldwide during the 200 years following the Industrial Revolution, denouncing the cruel conditions to which people are subjected, searching for survival. The photographic series became widely known and emblematic of his artistic project, which could now be understood as a fierce desire to resist the threat of global capitalism. In Exodus (1999) he continued along the same path, recording migratory movements in their most brutal or subtle forms of violence, portraying people displaced for ethnic, religious, political or cultural reasons. 

In these first works there is a desire for transcendence, reaching beyond the raw documentation of the reality of human misery in a search for, in the words of the photographer, “a little hope, dignity, resistance and humanity.” Salgado’s compassionate gaze makes us face the vulnerability of the other, as in the case of his images of the unlicensed miners in Serra Pelada, or of the sulfur miners in Indonesia, enveloped in sulfuric vapors, or of an oil field in Kuwait – where we can almost smell the terrible fumes of burning oil. His search to reach beyond the factual, and his sensitivity when organizing the scene based on its emotional dimension, elevate his work to a “universality in the search for humanity, as a possible redemption beyond the apocalyptic view of modernity,” in the words of Professor Karl Erik SchØllhammer in his work Além do visível: o olhar da literatura [Beyond the Visible: the Gaze of Literature, 2007]. These were to be his mark and his legacy, which distinguish him from so many other photojournalists who are driven by the drama of human despair.

At the same time, however, his photographs impose an experience on us at the very edge of what cannot be represented. Further, according to Schollhammer: “There is no possible way to imagine what those he portrayed have lived through; there is no way to put ourselves in their situation or capture their real experience. The images reveal this unpronounceable and inhumane secret that belongs to the Other.” In other words, in the face of the explosion of media to which we are now exposed, these images, instead of making us shudder and moving us to act, would keep us in the comfortable position of mere spectators.

NEW NEW WORLD

Salgado’s work is characterized by a powerful organic connection with his own life. After experiencing the overwhelming and devastating impact of the Exodus project, he returned to Brazil in order to re-establish his faith in the world. The hardships of hunger, misery and hopelessness were set aside. In his next project, Genesis (2013), instead of denouncing ecological disaster, he rejoices in the miracle of existence at the ends of the planet. In several of these photographs, Salgado is involved in a certain lyricism – also found in Other Americas – as if this project rescued the old storyteller of fantastic tales. We are no longer faced with what is supposedly incapable of being portrayed, but by images that celebrate a possible life. This is evident in the film The Salt of the Earth (2014), co-directed by German filmmaker Wim Wenders and Salgado’s son Juliano. In several scenes, the photographer  tells the stories of capturing the images – such as the famous portrait of the ancient turtle, in which he crawls on his hands and knees to photograph his subject from a low angle, with the dignity and reverence that he believed the centenarian reptile deserved. 

If in Genesis Salgado adopts a more optimistic tone compared to his previous series, he remains faithful to the heroic narrative of revealing a virgin world for the viewer, venturing to “unexplored” places. In his last work, Amazon (2021), his six-year search for the idyllic in the region is again matched with a critical view. The visitor’s experience in the exhibition – first shown in Paris, then in São Paulo and in Rio de Janeiro – was conceived of as a journey through the forest: we follow the course of the river by boat and enter the forest, until we arrive at a village where we meet the indigenous inhabitants. 

The music acts a thread that guides us through the experience and the emotions of the spectator: images are projected with a soundtrack commissioned from the French composer Jean-Michel Jarre, who makes use of recorded sounds from the Amazon held in the collection of the Museum of Ethnography in Geneva, as well as Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos’s symphony Erosion. The  installation rescues the special place that music occupied in the life of Salgado who, at the age of 8, performed on the radio station Cultura ZYZ 28 in his hometown of Aimorés in Minas Gerais and later sang religious music in the choir of the Salesian College in Vitória, Espírito Santo, which allowed him to “travel in the Christian history of humanity,” as he tells it.

In this new hero journey, built in the last of his long expeditions of exploration, he employs his famous visual rhetoric, to which he now adds music, to articulate a form of final redemption through the photographic image.

AGNOSTIC IMAGE

In general, Salgado’s images are understood within the tradition of documentary photography, which presupposes the belief – built throughout history – that what we see has a direct connection with reality. He went to some of the most remote parts of the planet with the aim of unveiling this supposed reality – not an idea of reality, a form of reality, but reality itself. His photographs would mirror the world; seeing his portraits equates to meeting those he portrayed in flesh and blood. From this perspective, the photographer’s gaze is like the “gaze of God”, who sees it all, who invokes and fosters belief. Viewers see in the image what they believe – or want to believe. Documentary photography has this strength – and this fragility.

Contemporary photography – at least since the 1980s – has developed a growing distrust (or even a complete rejection) of this “real”, questioning the perspective of the authors and the boundaries between ethics and aesthetics in the production of images. Thus, it has become increasingly focused on a constructed photograph, reflecting “possible worlds”, rather than a pre-existing “reality”. Michel Poivert, the French historian of photography, calls these posed photographs “agnostic”, even though they incorporate the aesthetics of documentary photography. It is not an image that is believed in, but that is imagined – as opposed to the modern ideology of objectivity, upon which documentary photography is based.

Criticism of the Eurocentrism of modern photography, for example, reverberates with great intensity today, especially in Brazil, in which the decolonial emphasis has introduced new parameters for representation and visibility. Viewers today demand a multiplicity of narratives which match the many different perspectives of society. In this context in which ethnic, social and gender minorities articulate and make their voices heard, the figure of the hero-photographer, who comes from outside to represent others, loses meaning. The photographer is increasingly the voice of the communities themselves, producing images that originate from within, not necessarily as a form of criticism, but affirming their place of speech.

This new ethical and political relationship in the production and circulation of images is also reflected in the aesthetics of contemporary photography, affecting, in retrospect, the perception of Sebastian Salgado’s work. How the current gaze will shape the legacy of this hero of his time for new generations, time will say. ///

Originally published in the print edition of ZUM Magazine #29, available in the IMS online store.

TERESA BASTOS (Itabirito, Minas Gerais, 1965) is a researcher and professor, with a PhD in Languages and Literature Studies from PUCRio. She completed postdoctoral studies in photography at the Sorbonne University (US) in Paris and in communication and culture at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). She is an associate professor at the UFRJ School of Communication.

Tags: fotografia, fotografia contemporânea, fotojornalismo