Master photographer Sebastião Salgado tells Aidan Dunne about capturing human suffering and natural beauty.
Sebastião Salgado is probably the most famous photographer in the world. Disseminated through numerous prints, reproductions, magazines, big books, and huge exhibitions, his work has reputedly been seen by more people than that of any other photographer. He works in black and white on vastly ambitious projects that he himself designs, yet he describes himself as a journalist and brushes off any suggestion that he is an artist. That, he reckons, is for posterity to decide. "I am a journalist. I tell stories. I always shoot stories. I must get a story, I must be linked to my own history."
Exodus, the first part of which opens in Cork next week, is undoubtedly the summer highlight of Cork 2005. Shown in two parts (the second follows in the Triskel Arts Centre in July), it features 300 images from his mammoth series Migrations, during which he criss-crossed the globe photographing people forced to move by war, famine, political oppression, poverty or other factors. The images are powerful, epic in scope, compassionate and heroic, and display Salgado's extraordinary natural flair for pictorial composition, his uncanny ability to orchestrate every disparate element of a scene within the confines of an image.
He likes black and white because it is easier to control than colour. "A patch of red in a colour photograph can destroy concentration. You look at the red, not what the photographer wants you to look at." By now, of course, he sees in black and white: "It's easy for me to be inside the image in black and white." His aim, he says, is that, having seen an exhibition by him, you will emerge a changed person.
There's no false modesty in the statement and none about Salgado generally (he doesn't use special lighting, "I bring light with myself," he says), but he is someone who drives himself hard and, given the public response to his work, you'd have to say that it's not an unreasonable aspiration.
Certainly great things are expected of Exodus in Cork, and invitations to the opening are the hottest ticket in town. Yet Salgado himself will not be there. An inveterate and apparently tireless globetrotter, he is in Japan and, after returning to Paris, where he has been based since 1968 (with a brief sojourn in London), he plans to spend a couple of months in Amazonia, photographing indigenous tribes people for his current project Genesis.
Something else draws him back to Amazonia. It is, in many respects, home. He is Brazilian and grew up in Amazonia but, more to the point, since 1990 he and his wife Lélia have invested significant amounts of time, money, creative imagination and their considerable organisational ability in their Instituto Terra. He is infectiously passionate about Terra and tremendously excited by its possibilities. Typically for the Salgados, it is a staggeringly ambitious undertaking.
Just hours inland from their house on the coast in southeast Brazil, they are in the midst of planting one and a half million trees on 1700 acres of former farmland - hopelessly depleted land purchased from Salgado's family in 1991. "We've already planted 740,000 trees of 160 different species. We're recreating an entire ecosystem. Already, many species of insects birds and animals have moved back in. We have a tree nursery, there is an educational programme, a cinema . . . " Terra is intimately linked to Genesis and both represent something of a sea change for Salgado. They are a direct response to his many long years spent documenting misery and inhumanity.
HE WAS BORN in Aimorés in Brazil. His father was a rancher and the family seem to have been comfortably off. He studied economics, met Lélia while they were both at college, and began working in economic planning for the state. But the regime in Brazil was becoming increasingly totalitarian, he and Lélia had left-wing sympathies and, in a climate of arrests and torture, were increasingly at risk. They set off for Paris, where he continued along the path to a career in economics. In fact his first photographs were taken with a camera Lélia had bought.
Unsurprisingly, Salgado says that he felt immediately at home with the camera - unsurprisingly because, like Don McCullin, who also uses black and white and whose work he greatly admires, he clearly has a natural flair, an inbuilt instinct for a picture.
Over the next few years, his inclinations drifted more towards photography than economics, and eventually, in 1972, he took the plunge. He was a busy and proficient photojournalist, as a glance at his CV will confirm. He quickly moved up the agency ranks, from Sygma to Gamma to Magnum, which he joined in 1979 and, famously, acrimoniously quit in the early 1990s.
Two incidental pieces of work enabled him to change his life completely. Chance led him to accept an assignment to photograph Ronald Reagan, and he was within feet of the president when he was shot in Washington in 1981. His pictures sold all over the world. Then, in 1986, in Brazil on other business, he visited the Serra Pelada gold mine. The pictorial possibilities of the mine, where thousands of men toiled in primitive conditions, covered in mud and dust, scaling the hillsides like so many ants, were well known. But Salgado, as ever, shot in black and white, and the photographs he took have an uncanny, Biblical quality. They really do stop you in your tracks and make you wonder what on earth we are doing to the world and each other. In fact some commentators still regard them as his best work. What they did, though, was to win him his freedom.
He had never been happy to be at the mercy of editors. He wanted to work on long, thematic series of photographs, and he wanted to be in control, and he came up with a brilliant business plan that has enabled him to do both those things ever since.
"There are magazines that I know will be interested. I will discuss it with them and normally, out of those I talk to, there will be a group of perhaps seven or eight, and they commit themselves to running features." Add the eventual books, exhibitions and reproductions, and he and Lélia - she is closely involved in the Amazonas Images agency, for which Salgado is the sole photographer - have successfully financed projects that would be otherwise unimaginable.
The first, following directly from Serra Pelada, was Workers, a marathon attempt to document manual labour in a postindustrial age. After that came Migrations. They were tough, not merely in terms of the physical stamina they demanded - he visited 26 countries for Workers - but also tough on morale.
"I like travelling," Salgado explains, "and I've organised my sentimental life so that it's possible for me to do that. I think if you have a strong sense of personal equilibrium you are okay regardless of the circumstances."
WHAT HE WAS photographing, however, took a heavy toll. "I encountered so many terrible stories, such cruelty, so much horror, that it brought me to the point of losing hope for the survival of our species. The things that were done in Africa, in the former Yugoslavia, were beyond belief. But even England, a civilised country . . . when Britain still ruled Hong Kong, I visited a concentration camp there in which 25,000 Vietnamese people were held, many of them for more than a decade. There were children of 10 and 11 who had never known life outside the camp. Yet this was part of England, part of our own familiar, civilised world. I thought we are so predatory, so cruel that something must be genetically wrong with us. And I would like to believe that we might evolve in a way that allows us to survive. But we are so aggressive. We forget that we are part of nature and want to put ourselves above it."
Salgado is 61 now. After Migrations, he reckoned he would only tackle one more multi-year project - though of course he won't give up photography. "Forty-six per cent of the world is substantially untouched by us, so I wanted to look at these parts of the world. It is my homage to nature."
He chose the title Genesis because he wanted to evoke the planet in a state of relative innocence." Most of where he is travelling is uninhabited by humans, but there are people included as well: "As with certain tribes of Indians in Amazonia. People who struggle with the environment for survival."
It has been argued that his pictorial instincts undermine his aim, which is, after all, nothing less than to change the world. When he depicts people under pressure, people who are suffering, they seem heroically dignified, the photographs are beautiful, stirring. But, as he emphasises, his is not the gaze of a western art photographer, he feels he is literally inside his images, part of their world. "I'm Brazilian, and that means I'm not a modernist, I'm not a postmodernist: Brazil is the most baroque country in the world, and my work reflects that." At the conclusion of our conversation, he returns to the subject of Terra. "In fact," he says, "we are currently working on something that comes out of that, something bigger. We want to plant 50 million trees. To create an environment that will support 100,000 people in an environmentally friendly way, that will encourage species diversity. We have gone into enormous detail. The budget we are looking at is $50 million [€41 million]. You think that's a lot? It is a lot. But then you think, a single fighter aircraft costs over $200 million [€165 million]. One plane." He has a point.