In the Upper Xingu region of Brazil’s Mato Grosso state, a group of Waura Indians fish in the Puilanga Lake near their village. The Upper Xingu Basin is home to an ethnically-diverse population, with the 2,500 inhabitants of 13 villages speaking languages with distinct Carib, Tupi and Arawak roots. While they occupy different territories and preserve their own cultural identities, they co-exist in peace. Brazil. July, August and September 2005.
©Sebastiao SALGADO / Amazonas Images / NB Pictures
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"... [T]he deepest quality of a work of art
will always be the quality of the mind
of the producer."
- Henry James
I have been preoccupied for some time
now with the much-awaited publication of the Brazilian photographer Sebastião
Salgado’s mammoth project entitled Genesis.
I first learnt about Sebastião Salgado through Parvati Nair’s work,
although at the time I had no access to his pictures. It was not
until after I began to actively pursue my interest in photography and started
looking at the work of classic and contemporary photographers that I delved into Salgado's works, and like countless viewers, found myself completely enthralled. Like the
profoundest works of art, Salgado’s photographs are awe-inspiring and humbling to
say the least. It is impossible to be sensitive and not to respond to them in
some way, and that is why perhaps, his work has provoked extremes of reaction.
While it has moved some to tears, it has angered others so much so that Salgado
has faced tremendous opposition to exhibiting or publishing his works in places.
I
am trying to catch what I can of Genesis,
from wherever I can, on the internet. The book has been released in Europe on
May 1, but will not be available in the US until mid-June. I am never able to
view more than a few of Salgado’s pictures at a time. I have to stop, and let
it all seep in. Every time I view or think of them, I am confronted with the
truth of my utter insignificance before the vast problems humankind has created
for itself. “C’est émotionelle,” (“It’s
emotional”) says Salgado, describing the appeal of his work in an interview in one of the
videos on the Amazonas Images site. True,
though it could perhaps be said of his work what T.S. Eliot said of the
metaphysical poets—that their kind of poetry was one in which thought became
feeling and feeling became thought. This is why photographers find unparalleled
aesthetic finesse in Salgado’s work,
and even if you are not interested in photographic technique, you still know you are
beholding something very, very special. It is a very happy marriage of content
and form, so that form never comes across as obtrusive.
Introducing Genesis recently in Longbeach, California, Salgado narrated how he
came to photograph as he does, and in due course recounted what a deeply
physical toll his engagement with photography had taken on him. In a video of
the event (which you can watch by clicking here)
he talks of a time when he would not ejaculate but emit blood when he made love
with his wife. He was told by his doctor that he was clinically alright, but he
had witnessed way too much death around him in Rwanda, so that he was dying inside,
and the only medicine was to stop his work for some time. And stop he did, and
that was how Genesis came into being.
He went back to Brazil, and his family gave him and his wife the land they
owned in the countryside, which was forested once upon a time. The Salgados
wanted to renew the land as it once was, covered by a rainforest, and began an
environmental project, a global expression of which is embodied by Genesis. In course of time Salgado
envisioned another multi-year-long project that would comprise photographs of
areas of the earth as yet untouched by modernization, of peoples who have had no
contact outside their immediate communities or tribes, and still keep to their
traditional ways of life, and patterns of economic organization. I became part of the rapt North American
audience that I watched on video, listening to Salgado telling his story in his
English inflected by his Brazilian Portuguêse, and what came through was the
sheer energy and lifelong commitment of the man to register felt reality in all
its intensity in the images he made. It is this deep existential charge that
animates every single picture of Salgado’s, so that even before you know his
story, you sense there is an exceptional story. From what I have seen of Genesis so far, the closest literary
equivalent I can think of is the Sri Lankan novelist Romesh Gunesekara’s ineffably
beautiful and indescribably sad novel Heaven’s
Edge.
The reception and circulation of
Salgado’s work is informed by a paradox, which interests me particularly. The
subjects of his representation do not get to see the final body of work in
which they are represented, although Salgado stays with them for days and interacts
very closely during the time he photographs. As he says himself, by the time he photographs them,
he knows their story, and they know his, and sometimes the subjects even
determine how they want to be photographed. Nevertheless, they are untouched by
modernization in the same way as those viewers of Salgado who have access to
his works in published form. In this sense his work is not unlike the work of
anthropologists, and particularly anyone working with a postcolonial agenda,
although Salgado has himself resisted the label ‘anthropologist’. His work also raises some deep questions
about the very nature of art. If the best art must be that which evokes the deepest
sadness in its audience, is it not then at odds with such suffering? Is the art not in some
sense protesting the loss it depicts, and the sense of loss that it evokes in its audience? Salgado, though, talks of Genesis as a project of hope, as a way of showing that
there are still parts of the earth that are as pristine as they were when the
world began. He is said to be fond of stating the statistic that 45% of the
earth is in such an uncorrupted state. But this statistic looks hopeful only because
of one recognizes the real threat of environmental pollution, the irrevocability
of modernization, and the rapacious greed fostered by capitalist consumerism. Salgado’s
photographs are a clarion call to action, and yet when you think of it, in a perfect
world, where his vision would be realized, there would be no occasion for such
pictures. There are no ready answers to any of the questions these pictures ask of us. Who must this first person plural I have just used mean, and by implication, who are the others? It is a war between the brooding sense of the fact that our planet is slowly dying, and a contrary, desperate will to
make it all turn out otherwise that we are left with.
Text © DURBA BASU
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