Parker Salgado

8/8/2019 Parker Salgado

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Tara, the hundred-and-twenty-foot ice-breaking yacht that Salgado and the author sailed on from Ushuaia, the southernmost town in


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The Amazonas photographic agencyis in a neighborhood of rising ele-gance and property prices in northeast-ern Paris,in a former coal warehouse onthe Saint-Martin canal. Just in front ofthe building, a steeply arched wrought-iron footbridge extends over the water tothe Htel du Nord,where Marcel Carn

set his melancholyfi

lm of the samename. Inside the agency, which featuresfloors of polished hardwood that wereimported from Brazil, half a millionpostcard-size work prints are immacu-lately arranged in smooth-running draw-ers.Six people work here, including twofull-time photographic printers, eachwith his own darkroom.

Sebastio Salgado, the Brazilian-born photojournalist known for beau-tiful black-and-white photographs of

people living difficult lives,is the agencysonly photographer. In the world of pho-tojournalism,a place where his fame andmagisterial rhythm of work give him asingular status, Salgado has the addeddistinction of being his own producer:he owns the factory. And although Sal-gado often works abroad, when he doesreturn to his family in Paris he walkseach day to Amazonas, from an apart-ment fifteen minutes away.

One morning a few weeks ago, Sal-

gado was in the basement of the office,where the sound of continuously runningwaterprints were being rinsed nearbygave the room the feel of compulsorycalm found in the lobbies of some expen-sive hotels.On a wall in front of him wasa poster-size reproduction of a photo-graph he had taken in Serra Pelada, aBrazilian gold mine, in 1986. It showedthousands of mensacrificial and single-minded,each apparently working for him-selfcovering every surface of a greatopen pit, hauling dirt-filled sacks onmakeshift ladders.A silvery sheen of mudcovers the men,making it nearly impossi-ble to tell that they are wearing modernclothes. A contemporary image saturatedin the long history of South Americangold prospecting and in a longer historyof human toil, it comes from a series ofextraordinary photographs taken at thesame mine which have been described asevocative of the masterworks of PieterBrueghel and Cecil B.De Mille.Fusingfact to myth, past to present, the imageshelped propel Salgados already successfulcareer to something far loftier, much the

THE NEWYORKER, APRIL 18, 2005 143

rgentina, to the Antarctic Peninsula, in January, 2005. Photographs by Sebastio Salgado.

PROFILES

A COLD LIGHTHow Sebastio Salgado captures the world.

BY IAN PARKER


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way Bono is something more than a popstar.Salgado,a former economist,has be-come an architect of photojournalisticprojects with a global reach,an icon of so-cial conscience, a kind of solo branch ofthe United Nations.

A broad-shouldered,Picasso-ish man

of sixty-one, he was wearing jeans anda V-necked cashmere sweater over achecked shirt. He had a penknife in aleather pouch fixed to his belt, and gold-rimmed half-moon reading glasses on achain around his neck.His head is shavedbald, and his face is unlined; you canthereforefind your gaze skidding off him,or snagging on his bushy eyebrows,whichrise and fall in the beseeching way of aconductor squeezing sad and delicatesounds out of an orchestra.Llia WanickSalgado, his wife of more than thirty

years, the editor of his books and his ex-hibitions,and the director of Amazonas,

was consulting with Salgado about a fu-ture retrospective in Paris. She is a slim

woman with a smokers dark-texturedvoice; she was dressed all in black, andat one point in the conversation her hus-band spun her slowly around, pickingpieces of lint from her clothes; when he

was done, she kissed him on the lips.Llia went to the office space upstairs,

where Sebastios photographs are sold tomagazines,and where they are collected in

vast books and travelling exhibitions,and

where the phone calls are about honorarydegrees and invitations to sit on panels andaccept awards.(We have two talents andthey are complementary, she later said.He knows how to take photographs andI know how to exploit them.) Down-stairs, Salgado sat at a table with a long-

time colleague, Franoise Piffard. Theyhad boxes of small, freshly printed pho-tographs in front of themimages fromhis latest long-term, self-assigned proj-ect,Genesis.For thefirst time,Salgadois photographing wild animals insteadof people, in an enterprise that carries atleast a hint of the idea that he is owed avacation.He is visiting environments un-changed by human progress, after morethan thirty years spent photographingmiserably changing environments, and

people in the middle of economic or po-litical upheaval. Salgado started Gene-sis last year, photographing giant tor-toises in the Galpagos Islands, gorillasin central Africa, whales off the Argen-tine coast. He expects to finish in 2012.

Salgado had just returned from Ant-arctica, and before him were dozens ofsmall photographs of penguins feedingtheir offspring by regurgitation, jammingtheir beaks down into the throats of theiryoung; there were also glaciers, and ice-bergs,and albatrosses looking directly intothe camera. Nice, nice pictures. Incredi-ble dignity they had,Salgado said of the

birds.Hisfirst language is Portuguese,andhe speaks both French and English withan accent that becomes stronger if he getsagitated or excited; in English,refugeesbecomes hefugees, for example.

The work prints needed to be dividedinto two piles: yes and no. Such sifting

would eventually lead to a final selection of

aboutfi

fty images, which would be pre-sented to magazines.In an action repeatedevery minute or so, Salgado held up twophotographs with a similar composition,often taken moments apart, and he andPiffard would try to find a weaker printto reject,with Salgado saying,I wish thesky was a bit more dramatic, or, I dontthink thats too horrible, or enthusing,Thats beautiful, no? That is the idea,how close we can be to Genesis,yet in ourtimes!Piffard wore magnifying goggles,

and peered forward with pursed lips,like ajeweller; at times she questioned a com-position,or simply said,I dont think so.Salgado decided on rejects only grudg-ingly,slapping them down like a frustratedpoker player. When he put neither printinto the reject pile (which was growingmore slowly than the other),Piffard said,Oh,Sebastio,disapprovingly.

Im happy,Salgado said.He rubbedhis hand over his smooth scalp.I believewe have a story. In the room next door,

the printers were making more penguins,and more albatrosses. Salgado had re-turned from Antarctica with more thanten thousand negatives.

A few weeks earlier,I had watched Sal-gado unpack his bags in a cabin ona hundred-and-twenty-foot ice-breaking

yacht moored in the harbor of Ushuaia,the southernmost town in Argentina. Atmid-evening,the air was cool,but summersunshine still entered the room through

a skylight. All this is a question of adap-tation, Salgado said, as he arranged hispossessions in the small space. You adapt

yourself to any kind of place you find.Hehad four identical medium-format cam-eras, each the size of a brick, and severalhundred rolls of black-and-white film,

which he lined up on the higher of thetwo bunk beds as neatly as in a store dis-play. He showed me two pairs of khakipants into which Llia had sewn Velcrostrips at the knee, on the inside, for at-taching little pads that made kneeling onthe ground more comfortable; some newsnow-proof boots; and tiny elasticized

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144 THE NEWYORKER, APRIL 18, 2005

Lets go someplace awful to avoid the tourists.


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rain protectors for his camerasviewfind-ers which he had made out of showercaps. He had a ball of wool for darninghis sweater, anti-inflammatory drugsfor a damaged tendon,Quaker Oats,andPortuguese translations of books byBruce Chatwin and John Kenneth Gal-braith.And here arefingerless gloves,he

said.In reality, they are not

fingerless.You go like this, now out. He folded

down a flap, and his fingerless gloves be-came mittens. To change the films, youput here again, thats it.That is this.Herefolded the flap, then went back andforth: glove,mitten.

The ship was due to sail around CapeHorn, and then south to the Chilean is-lands of Diego Ramrez, and then thetwo hundred andfifty or so miles of opensea to the Antarctic Peninsula, an arm on

the continent which stretches north to-ward South America. Salgado would beat sea for six weeks,and I was joining himfor part of his trip.The ship was strikinglyhandsome from the outsidewith an un-painted hull of reinforced aluminum thathad the broad, shallow proportions of asurfboardbut its interior was not luxu-rious. It felt like an overcrowded beachhouse whose dcor had been neglectedsince the mid-nineteen-eighties: the fit-tings were nondescript pale wood,and the

bench seats had worn,blue foam cushions.The walls were decorated with framedimages of Endurance, the ship captainedby the British Antarctic explorer ErnestShackleton; Endurance was trapped byice in 1915,and then destroyed by it.

There were eight small cabins, eachwith two narrow bunk beds. The boatsowner, tienne Bourgois, was housedclose to Salgado. Bourgois, an amiable,troubled-looking man of forty-four, is thedirector of Agns B., the French fashioncompany founded by his mother, Agns.Divorced and the father offive,Bourgoishas the face of a young man but the tuftybaldness of a sixty-year-old,giving the im-pression of a high-school student playingKing Lear. Bourgois bought the ship in2003 from the estate of Sir Peter Blake,the New Zealand sailing hero and Amer-icas Cup winner. In 2001, Blake sailedthe shipthen called the Seamastertothe Amazon.Near the mouth of the river,armed pirates forced their way on board.Blake was standing at the bottom of thestairs that connect the living quarters to thedeck when he openedfire on them with a

shotgun that he kept on board. He shottwofingers off a pirates hand,but the gunjammed;Blake was shot and killed.Leadfrom Blakes cartridge was still embed-ded in a window at the top of the stairs.

In the last years of his life,Blake was agood-will ambassador for the United Na-tions Environment Program,UNEP.After

Bourgois bought the Seamaster

and re-named it Tara, his familys traditionalname for its boatshe arranged to con-tinue the association with UNEP.UNEP of-ficials also happened to be in conversationwith Salgado,and knew of his plans to in-clude Antarctica among the twenty or sostories that would make up the Genesisproject. Bourgois offered Salgado a ride.For all the obvious appeal of a privateyacht exploring the continent on its owntimetable, Salgado hesitated. Bourgoiss

idea was a shared expedition for poets,painters, and photographers. I said no,Salgado told me. I said, I apologize,I cannot accept to go and look at thingstogether, one make pictures, anotherwritea kind of tourism. I must go towork. (Salgado has been to every countryin the world, he says, except New Zea-land,Nicaragua,and Tonga,and has neverbought himself a souvenir.) Bourgois andSalgado agreed on a separate trip;the art-ists would have their adventure another

time. His agency put up about twentythousand dollars, a quarter of the cost.

Tara had sixteen people on board,most of them Bourgoiss compatriots.There was a paid crew offive, includ-ing the ships captaina woman in herthirtiesand a young female chef andher boyfriend,a sailor who had recentlybought a trumpet but had only learnedto play the opening notes of La Vieen Rose.Tara was also carrying Bour-goiss cousin and business partner,as well

as a wiry alpine climbing guide with aG.P.S.-equipped wristwatch; an officialTara photographer; three experiencedFrench sailors; and two men from aFrench nature television show, who were

doing research for a possible Antarcticadocumentary.(Salgado was wary.TV isheavy,he said.People are always so im-pressed. Oh, its television. )

Tara was delayed in Ushuaia for a day.The crew and guests ate lunch and drankwine together squeezed around a tablein the main living area.Salgado, the old-

est at the table, was friendly, but in arather formal, fastidious way; a man-ner that was mirrored in the care withwhich he used his penknife (rather thanthe available silverware) to cut up fruit.Asked about his priorities in Antarctica,he said, I want everythingthe ani-mals, the landscapes.I want the planet.After lunch, when the table becamecluttered with the digital cameras andlaptop computers of his shipmates (Sal-gado had neither), he walked into town

to buy some Ziploc bags. Sunlight waspeeping through gray Scottish skies.Look at this light,oh boy,he said, add-ing, with a black-and-white photogra-phers satisfaction, In color, this is shit.

Genesis is mainly funded by Ama-zonasdeals with magazines and newspa-pers,among them,Paris Match, in France;the Guardian, in Britain; Rolling Stone,in the United States;and Viso, in Portu-gal. (This leaves a financial shortfall thatis made up by grants, including three hun-

dred thousand dollars from the Chris-tensen Fund,and by the occasional adver-tising jobIlly coffee, for examplefor

which Salgado asks around thirty thou-sand dollars a day.) Eventually, there islikely to be a Genesis book and exhibi-tion. Im having the opportunity of mylife to be in the most beautiful places inthe planet!he said.And probably doingmy last story in photography. Ill finish

when Im seventy years old.Not that Illstop photography, but Im not sure if Illhave strength enough to do another long-term project.

His two previous projects on a similarscale, Workers and Migrations, eachtook more than fi ve years. The latter, astudy of people displaced by war and by aglobalized world economy,was punishingto produce, physically and mentally, andleft Salgado unsure if mankind deservedto survive. The Genesis project had itsroots in that period of despair, Salgadosaid. But he is a former Marxist activistand a onetime student of Esperanto, andalthough he has lost the big mustache ofhis youth,he has a surviving confidence in

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Two Kosovar women, among the tens of thousands of refugees who left their homes toflee the conflict with the Serbs, on the road


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tween Kuks and the Morini border post, in Albania, in 1999.


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the possibility of prompting radical ac-tion.Genesiswas in part inspired by theInstituto Terra,a nonprofit environmentalfoundation that Llia and Sebastio runon seventeen hundred acres of formerfarmland in the rain forest of southeastBrazil. (The Salgados have a home bythe sea, a few hours away.) The Salga-

dos have planted seven hundred and fortythousand trees on the site so far,with theaim of planting a million and a half trees.

The land is returning to its prelapsarianstate; schoolchildren are being broughtto see it. This gave me a big hope that

we can live with nature,be in peace withour planet,Salgado said.Genesis, then,could set a similar example.Salgado,whotalks of his photography only as a toolan action undertaken in the world ofinformation, not the world of arthad

managed to balance gloom with a senseof purpose. Forty-six per cent of theplanet is not destroyed, he said. I mustshow this,take pictures that show its nec-essary to preserve these places.Show how

wide they are, how big they are.

Tara motored out of Ushuaia. Later,the sails were raised. Salgado madehimself weatherproof and took a king ofthe world spot on the bow. When dol-phins swam alongside,and his shipmates

dashed from side to side to photographthem (and while Bourgois leaned overthe railing and slapped Taras hull, in whatI took to be a known form of human-to-dolphin communication),Salgado re-mained still, and waited for a dolphin topass in front of his camera. RoundingCape Horn the following day, we tookphotographs of one another;Salgado didnot look in anyones lens, but insteadgazed down into the water,with the air ofmodest contemplation seen on the face of

a Virgin Mary in a Renaissance painting.We sailed south and lost sight of South

America. The air became colder and thesea rougher.Most of those on board spentthe afternoon queasily in bedincludingSalgado, who listened to his new iPod,

which, as he later showed me, includedChopins Nocturne No.2 and a Julio Igle-sias song in its Most Played list.

That night, Tara reached Diego Ra-mrez, a group of small islands sixtymiles southwest of Cape Horn, unin-habited but for a lonely meteorologicalstation on one of them.Salgado had of-ficial permission to land, a rare entitle-

ment owing something to the ships U.N.imprimaturand to the fact that Sal-gado himself is a good-will ambassadorfor UNICEF. After the ship spent a nightat anchor, he went ashore by inflatablemotorboat withfive others.What a priv-ilege to be here!Salgado said,after land-ing awkwardly on a small rocky beach atthe foot of some grassy cliffs. He putdown his stuff. Photojournalists do notusually travel with assistants, and Sal-

gado,who would never want to be takenout of that category, tends to travel alone,even after having made the switch, forGenesis, from 35-mm.Leicas to heav-ier,medium-format Pentax cameras.But

he accepts help, and allowed volunteersto carry some of his equipment. Sal-gado kept a camera over each shoulder.

It was cold and the sky was aflat gray.We began to climb the slope,pulling our-selves up by tufts of silvery-green grassfour or five feet high.Within moments,Salgado found himself standing beforea gray-headed albatrosssmooth andpolished,with smears of black around itseyes. At a distance of about six feet,Sal-

gado raised a camera: the shutter madea surprisingly loud clunk. He movedcloser, and quietly sang a classic bossa-nova song, A Felicidade.

Wheres my tripod? he asked. Theperson whos carrying my stuff needs to benear me. (His avuncular manner tight-ened into something harder when hebegan photographing; by the end of theday, he was holding a hand out behindhim,without turning around,to show thathe needed his tripod.) The others in thegroup had already taken their own pic-tures of the bird and moved on, and hadfound another albatross,and then another.

FOUR POEMS OF YOUTH

1. the dream

Laterthat now long-lost night

in December, beside you, I sawthat the leaves had returnedto the branchesoutside my window. Nowthat is all it was: leaves, blowingin the windy sunlight:somehow,in spite of the chances against itoccurring, in spite of the critics wan sneer,I dreamed this lovely thing.

2. minneapolis, 1960

Children in a classroom peerinto microscopes.Bombsightsit occursto the young womanmoving from oneto another, peripherallymesmerizedby the second hand,treesflailingdimly in windows.


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The slope was covered in birds,which hadrarely, if ever, seen humans and had no rea-son to fear them;they barely moved whenapproached, beyond turning their headsthis way and that, like fashion models. It

was hard to think of another environmentas congenial to the novice wildlife pho-tographer. (As Art Wolfe, one of Amer-icas leading photographers of wildlife,later explained, without scoffing,it is eas-ier if the animals are not running away.)

Salgado, unhurried by the activityabove him,retrieved his tripod while keep-ing his eye on thefirst albatross as if it werethe last bird on earth. He changed film

with the deliberation of a mime artist.Each time he took out an exposed film,hehad to lick a paper tag to seal it closed,andfor this he used a big,slow lick that hintedat the perils of rushed licking.Then,as he

wound in the newfilm, he sang moreloudly than before.Its the only way I getto hold my concentration, he later toldme.When you change the film,you break

your sequence.Changing film is an emptymoment and you fill it with the music.

Once, years ago, Salgado flew toRome to take a portrait of the novel-ist Italo Calvino. I can only give you anhour, Calvino said upon opening thedoor. Salgado said he needed at leasttwo or three days. (He got them.) Afterforty-five minutes on the island,Salgadowas still just a few feet above the beach.The day was arranging itself accordingto two different appreciations of timeand space: it was the unspoken instinct

of everyone but Salgado to reach the topof the slope quickly, then make a sur-veyto take possession of the pristineisland.Salgados instinct was to look onlyat the thing in front of him. Almost noone in the world has seen this, he said.His left hand, cupped under the lens,made minute movements to focus.

When he finally reached the top ofthe slope, he found hundreds of alba-trosses of a different species, sitting onmud nests the size and shape of a dogsfeeding bowl. Salgado inched amongthem,as infant albatrosses spilled orangevomit onto his new boots. When the

sun came out, he shot into the light, ashas always been his preference. (For me,the good pictures are against the light.Against the light, you have shapes, theforms get a contour. Its not easy but Ilike it.) He said that he wanted to showthe equilibrium of the birds and theirenvironment. Beyond Salgados hear-

ing, one of the party said, in a friendlyenough way, If its like this everyplace,well be on the island for three months.

Salgados reputation was built on mon-umental, backlit images of physicallabor and human fortitude, and to watchhim workto wake up for two weeksto the soft buzzing of Salgado shavinghis head smooth in the cabin opposite

was to be shown how a shadow of self-portraiture falls across those images. Sal-

gado would not mistake himself for asteelworker or an underfed migrant, butwhat has interested him in others is whathe looks for in himself: a level of imper-

viousness to testing conditions,and toler-ance of a long working day. For Salgado,taking pictures is a pleasure but also a dis-cipline: he is not the kind of photogra-pher who goes to pick up laundry carry-ing a loaded camera. When I spoke toRobert Pledge,Salgados friend and agentin the U.S.,he could not remember a sin-

gle occasion in thirty years when Salgadohad taken his photograph. (Salgado saidthat he remembered one.)

At the end of a cold, ten-hour stayon the island at Diego Ramrez,Salgadowas able to show no less interest in thedays last albatross than he had shown inthe firstholding his thumb and fore-finger together in a gesture of epicureansatisfaction while his shipmates slumpedon the springy earth, fully gorged onbirds and sea lions.I have a few good pic-tures,Salgado said.I dont think I havea great picture. The sky was fifty-per-cent sky, not a hundred-per-cent sky.Allmy life was like thatlooking and wait-ing for the combination.

For three days after leaving Diego Ra-mrez, Tara sailed across the Drake Pas-sage,beyond sight of land.Salgado had toendure a period of enforced inactivity.The

weather was stormy, and the front of theship rose up and then came banging down

with the sound of someone dropping asmall car onto the deck. Seawater washedover the skylights. In the living area, bluerubber matting was brought out to stop

3. on the run

Winter hours,whitedune grass.

Secretpinewoods to the oceannow what?

4. the blackout: first anniversary

Itfinds me in Port Authority, penniless,seated at a bar unable to rememberhow I came there (why is obvious).Do you know this terrornot to remember?I go to the mens room and look in the mirror,look in his aggrieved and music-haunted eyes.The mouth opens,but there are no words;

there are words, but the mouth will not open.Tears form but cannot fall, fingersgradually tightening at my throat . . .Blood of his blood,flesh of his ghostthe hand stretched toward me in the flames!Do you?I am worn out,I cant go on.

Franz Wright


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the plates from sliding off the table. Itbegan to snow. Salgado, restless at times,made slow tours of the main cabin, tryingto stay upright while reading and rereadingthe dishwashing roster and the warningson packets of seasickness pills.

Salgado is not an ebullient man:his so-ciability sometimes seems to come from a

portfolio of skills learned with the aim oftaking fine photographs; he often allowshis sentences to fade away, with a sighAnd this is that . . . But when he talksabout the Instituto Terra, to which heand his wife have given much of theirtime and income in recent years,he growsanimated. As we thumped through the

waves, he told me howfish and birdshad reappeared at the site; how his friendRobin Williams (with whom he spentElection Night last year in L.A.) had put

thirty thousand dollars into a theatre at theinstitute; how the institute had becomeone of the towns largest employers. Oneevening,he drew a little map of the land inmy notebook. The pumas are back! hesaid.You know,one puma tells another.

The Institutos seventeen hundredacres had previously belonged to Salgadosfather, a freemason and local assemblymember who was so formal that his chil-dren called him Senhor. Salgado grew upa few minutes from the ranch, in the town

of Aimors, in a house with seven sisters.His mother was a dressmaker.During hischildhood, Salgado watched as his fam-ilys land, once forest, turned to dust, ashis father brought more and more cattle

onto it.When Sebastio and Llia boughtthe acreage from the family, in 1991,theland was dead, Salgado said. Learningof their idea of turning the soil back overto trees, Salgados father told them thatthey were crazy. (He died in 2001; Sal-gados mother died the following year.)

I am from the most baroque place on

the planet,Salgado said to me.His fam-ily was not particularly religious, and he

grew up to be a nonbeliever, but Salgadosang (in Latin) in the choir of his Cath-olic, Salesian high school, and was sur-rounded by the kind of religious architec-ture and iconography that are embeddedin his work:Sudanese refugees illuminatedby heavenly shafts of light; a gold minerleaning on a post in the pose of a mar-tyred saint.To these childhood influencesSalgado then added a leftist sensibility,

formed at a moment of repression and re-bellion in Brazilian history. He studiedeconomics first in Vitria, the nearestlarge city to Aimors,where he met Llia,in 1964 (Oh,she was beautiful:thin,largebreasts, hallelujah! I heard him say onetime, turning his eyes upward), and thenin So Paulo.For a short while afterward,he worked as an economist in the Min-istry of Finance for So Paulo state. (AsSalgado pointed out,he had experience inplanning and financing large-scale proj-

ects long before the organizational feat ofWorkers.) By 1968, the military gov-ernment that had come to power in acoup four years earlier was evolving into afull-blown dictatorship, and the Salga-

dos became part of a protest movement.The couple gave money to the A.L.N.(Ao Libertadora Nacional), the armedgroup led by Carlos Marighella, who isnow best known as the author of theMinimanual of the Urban Guerrilla, aguide to terrorist techniques that influ-enced the tactics of the Baader-Meinhof

group and the I.R.A. At this time, Sal-gado was a Communist, and a supporterof the Cuban revolution;he was never anA.L.N. member, but he did meet Ma-righella. (Salgado later regretted havingtold me about his A.L.N.connection,notfor fear of seeming extreme but out ofanxiety that he would appear to be dress-ing himself in radical chic.)

The authorities made no move againstSebastio and Llia, but friends were ar-rested, and some of them were tortured.

We could either leave or become clan-destine, Salgado said, and in 1968 thecouple moved to Paris, where Sebastiostudied for a Ph.D. in economics at theSorbonne.Photographs taken at the timeshow him bearded, long-haired, and in-tense, looking much like the young BjornBorg.The Salgados remained politicallyactive. Later, their Brazilian passports

were revoked,and Salgado did not returnto that country until 1979. It was toughfor my father,Salgado said.When I left

Brazil, he was a strong man. When Icame back,he was an old man.

Llia began a course in architecture,and in 1970 she bought a Pentax camera,to use in her studies.When Salgado firstpicked the camera up, that summer, hehad never taken a photograph before. Inhis first, taken while on vacation in thesoutheast of France, Llia is seen sittingon a window with the light behind her.I knew when I looked inside this camera,now I had another way to relate with any

kind of thing,Salgado told me.It was sonatural.After finishing his Ph.D.course

work but before writing his thesis,Salgadoaccepted a well-paid job in London withthe International Coffee Organizationcoffees OPECand began to work on adiversification fund designed to raise cof-fee prices by encouraging growers to moveinto other crops. He took Llias cameraonfield trips to Africa. He was not satis-fied with economics,Llia remembered.But he was very happy to take pictures.

Sebastio set up a darkroom in theirapartment. At first, it was just fun,Llia recalled.One summer afternoon in

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Found meat is income.


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1972, he and Llia rented a rowing boatin Hyde Park and went out on the Ser-pentine to discuss their future.Id studiedmany years and I had a very good jobhard to get this joband I had an invi-tation to go to the World Bank in Wash-ington, Salgado said. But he wantedto be a photographer. Llia agreed he

should try, despite thefi

nancial risks.When Salgado resigned from the I.C.O.,soon after,his boss was exasperated by hisapparent navet. Of course you wantto be a photographer,he said.I want tobe a photographer. Mywifewants to bea photographer.

The Salgados moved back to Paris,and Salgado began to find work withtrade-union and church magazines: heshot stories about migrant workers andthe construction of the Pompidou Center.

But, as Robert Pledge recently recalled,he was lucky that Portuguese-speakingcountries were very much in the news.

That propelled him onto the circuit.Sal-gado was quickly taken on by the Sygmaagency, and covered Portugals CarnationRevolution, in 1974, and Angolas war ofindependence, which led to Portugals

withdrawal from the country, in 1975.And he did the everyday news storiesand golf tournaments of an agency pho-tographer. Pledge, who was then at the

Gamma agency, which Salgado joined in1975, could already detect Salgados rest-lessness.He quickly said, I dont want todo this all my life. He was talking aboutnot dealing with the news per se but usingthe news to deal with issuespoverty, in-

justice. That really struck me. Thats notwhat young photographers said then.

Sebastio and Llias first son, Juli-ano,was born in 1974.Rodrigo, their sec-ond, was born in 1979. He had Downsyndrome, a fact that his parents had not

known during the pregnancy.Salgado toldme that he cried for three hours after Ro-drigo was born. The baby suffered fromrespiratory problems, and Llia alwayskept him in her arms as he slept. Shethought he was going to die,Salgado toldme. (Today, Rodrigo lives with his par-ents.) By now, Salgado was frequently

working overseas;in 1979,he joined Mag-num, the lite and coperatively ownedphoto agency founded in 1947 by RobertCapa, with Henri Cartier-Bresson andothers. Llia told me, It was hard. Hethought I was strong,and could do it.AndI coulddo it, but it was a lotthe house,

the children, illness, all that. She neverasked him to stop, and he never thoughtof changing the pace or the emphasis ofhis work, in order to spend more time inParis. ( Juliano Salgado, who now worksin television and movies,and himself hasa son, told me that he thought of hisfather as an Indiana Jones figure.) In1981, Salgado was on his way back from

Australia when he accepted an assign-ment from the Times to spend three daysphotographing Ronald Reagan. Whenthe President was shot,outside the Wash-ington Hilton, Salgado was a few feetfrom the scene.Sales of Salgados photo-graphs from that day (he took seventy-sixframes, with three cameras, in about aminute) made enough money for him tobuy the apartment in Paris where he andLlia still live, and, in an uncharacter-isticallyflashy gesture, an Alfa RomeoAlfettaan incredibly nice car.

Late one evening,Taras captain calledus up to the bridge to see a singlegreen dot on the radar: the first iceberg.And when we woke the next morningthe ship was passing through a calm,wide channel with white mountains oneither side. There was a hint of some-thing sour and eggy in the air that welearned to recognize as the smell ofmassed penguins. Out of the wind, itbarely felt colder than a December day inCentral Park; and among the serioussailors there began a silent competition

to see who could respond to Antarc-tica with the most non-specialist ward-robe,at least for a few minutes at a time:T-shirts,baggy cardigans, plaid slippers.

We were near the northern tip of theseven-hundred-mile-long Antarctic Pen-insula,on the western side:a landscape offjords and islands.This strand of Antarc-tica is relatively close to South America,

and, because it is less cold than the massof the continent, a dozen or so scientificbases have been built by various countries,at the kind of rocky coastal spots also val-ued by penguins. These few sheds andhuts, along with some grander develop-ments, on the other side of Antarctica,and a station at the South Pole,constitute

virtually the only man-made environ-ment, and therefore human population,of the continent, which is one and a halftimes the size of the United States. We

dropped anchor close to the Chilean baseof Gonzalez Videla. Salgado went onshore dressed in many layers of clothingand walked up a little icy slope, where heput on sunglasses, and said quietly, Idont know if I can do this. Its too big.He was looking across at a panorama ofsea and icebergs.Glaciers slipped straightinto the sea, forming ice cliffs where theycame to an end in the water. It looked asif aflood had rolled into a Himalayan val-ley. I ask myself if its possible to repre-sent it by pictures,he said.

Salgado moved hesitantly off the iceonto dark rocks you could feel your


THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2005 151

Maybe we mate for life because were lazy.


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Salgados 1986 image of workers in the open pit of a mine at Serra Pelada, Brazil, a remote site in the Amazon where gold had

AMAZO

NAS/CONTACT


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en discovered a few years earlier. More thanfifty thousand prospectors were at work in Serra Pelada.


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pupils snap into dilationand wanderedamong a colony of gentoo penguins. Itwas a world of bleakly reduced diversity:a penguin factory with few plants or in-sects. Dozens of penguins crouched onnests made of piled pebbles;above, a fewpredatory skuas circled, looking for un-guarded penguin eggs or chicks. Now

and then, a penguin would throw backits head and screech, sending a puff ofcondensation into the air.

Salgado makes frequent use of theword dignity, and he gives it four sylla-bles in English:dig-in-i-ty.He has oftenphotographed people looking into hiscamera with a head-on stare that couldbe described as dignified reproach. Its alook that says, We are resourceful peo-ple,we can cope, but what you see is notgood. (Salgados efforts to represent his

subjects this way may have inadvertentlyworked against a larger goal of encour-aging social change; he has rarely shownpeople enraged by,or in revolutionary re-sistance to, their unhappy circumstances.)On the beach, Salgado seemed to besearching for a similar look in the wild-life. Freezing his position in the quarter-crouch of someone who has just begun tosit down, he waited for the penguins tolook at him, and, when they did, it washard not to project into their stare a si-

lent plea for the Kyoto Protocol. (Someof the gorillas and tortoises he recentlyphotographed gave him the same look.)I didnt wish this from the beginning,Salgado said, talking of this preferencefor eye contact. But Im very interestedin the animal. I pay attention to him, seewhat I can get from himwhat is hisface, what is his eyes, what his mind,what his preoccupation? Probably I canget this in pictures, inshallah.

Salgado stopped in front of a penguin

that was feeding two infants by regurgita-tion, and he became absorbed by thesight. Shes so proud of them, he said.He asked for his tripod. He looked and

waited, and each time the adult forced itsbeak down the throat of an infant he tookfive or six photographs, and his singingbecame louder. When he moved away,after an hour or so,during which a fearlesssmall white bird had pecked at my bootfifty times, he said, It was perfect, thehead on one side, the tail on the other.Describing how he had constructed theimage,he swept his hands in the air ballet-ically,then drew in my notebook:the adult

bird and the infant below it were togethercurled into the frame,as if into a Matissecollage, forming a low, condensed S.

Before we left the beach, Salgadowatched a penguin build a nest bycarrying pebbles in its beak,one by one.When we were back on the ship,he said,Photography is this disease, this thingthat you fix inside you; you go and you

go. Were like these birds.Get a stone toput there,get another stone to put there,until he has a nest. We do the same.

The decisive moment, its just a slice,Salgado said, using a phrase associated

with Cartier-Bresson,who was a friend ofthe Salgados. (A signed Cartier-Bressonprinta tree-lined country roadis oneof the few photographs on the walls oftheir Paris apartment;another is a picture

of the soccer legends Franz Beckenbauerand Pel talking to one another, naked, ina postgame communal shower.) Salgadodrew two axes of a graph on a sheet ofpaper, and then a sine curve (signifyingthe photographed phenomenon), witha horizontal tangent at the top (the pho-tograph).The economist and the photo-

journalist were now collaborating. Youhave a tangent thats just touching themost perfect moment of the phenome-non, he said. Thats the concept of the

decisive moment. But, for me, the mostimportant idea isnt to have the tangentthats zero. (He wrote this out: = 0.)If youre a smart guy,with a good camera,

with a good eye, you come from outsidethe phenomenon,andtukyou get thefabulous image. But long-term storiesare composed of a lot of different waves.

The most important thing for me is notwhether the tangent is zero,or minus one,or plus one, but to workinside the phe-nomenon. You are living the phenome-

non, and each click is one point. You doyour click at the strongest moment, ofcourse, when you have the perfect light,the perfect albatross, the perfect moun-tainbut then this is another, this is an-other. He drew more curves, each onebristling with tangents, and then an over-arching curve that encompassed them all.(It has sometimes been thought, even byhis friends, that Salgado could cut downon the multitude of tangents.Salgado isa good editor,but sometimes his books area little too fat,Robert Pledge said.)

Salgado did not invent the long-term documentary photographic story.

As he told me, Guys like W. EugeneSmith worked for years on projects.ButSmithto take Salgados examplewas a Lifestaff photographer for muchof his career, and struggled tofinance hislater independent projects.Salgado,whotook up photography several years beforeSmiths death, began working in an era

when few, if any, magazines can under-write multiple tangents from a singlephotographer.The challenge was tofinda way to work as if you had a mid-centuryLifecontract when you did not.

I found it frustrating to shoot onestory and jump to another,Salgado said.He wanted to work symphonically. (Infact, he has looked for a composer to write music to accompanyGenesis.)One way to slow the pace was to workin partnership with organizations like the

World Council of Churches, as he hasdone since the beginning of his career.In 1984 and 1985,he took photographsin Africas drought-affected Sahel re-gion, in collaboration with MdecinsSans Frontires,which received proceedsfrom a subsequent book.

Another strategy was to tack personalstories onto commissioned ones. Sal-gados 1986 trip to the Serra Pelada goldmine, for example, was made betweenassignments in South America for two

German magazines. Gold had been dis-covered at the remote siteSerra Peladameans bald mountainsseveral yearsearlier, attracting more than fifty thou-sand prospectors, and, in turn, the atten-tion of the media. Timehad comparedthe mine to an outlandish biblical epicmovie; the Chilean-born artist Alfredo

Jaar had shown photographs of the mineat the 1986 Venice Biennale. Everybodyhad shot this story before me, Salgadosaid.But, as Robert Pledge remembered

it, Salgado said,I want to do it in black-and-white, for the record. Its my coun-try, after all. He went there for three

weeks and shot all day. Because the storywas hardly breaking news,it was anothersix months before Salgado took the timeto look at the photos he had taken. Eventhen, he said,I thought they were O.K.

The reaction was a big surprise.The photographs were published first

in the SundayTimes magazine,in London.He made his name on that story,Colin

Jacobson, a leading British photo editor,and the founder of the magazineReport-age, recently recalled. It was phenome-

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T Y04 18 05PAGE155133SCLI E OPIARTR14039 B

In 1969, the drive from Minneapolisto St. Louis took twelve hours andwas mostly on two-lane roads.Myparents woke me up for it at dawn.Wehad just spent an outstandingly funweek with my Minnesota cousins,butas soon as we pulled out of my unclesdriveway these cousins evaporated frommy mind like the morning dew fromthe hood of our car. I was alone in the

back seat again.I went to sleep, and mymother took out her magazines, andthe weight of the long July drive fellsquarely on my father.

To get through the day,he madehimself into an algorithm, a numbercruncher.Our car was the axe withwhich he attacked the miles listed onroad signs, chopping the nearlyunbearable 238 down to a still daunting179, bludgeoning the 150s and 140sand 130s until they yielded the halfway

humane 127,which was roundabledown to 120,which he could pretendwas just two hours of driving time eventhough,with so many livestock trucksand thoughtless drivers on the roadahead of him,it would probably takecloser to three.Through sheer force ofwill, he mowed down the last twentymiles between him and double digits,and these digits he then reduced bytens and twelves until, finally, he couldglimpse it: Cedar Rapids 34.Only

then, as his sole treat of the day, did heallow himself to remember that 34 wasthe distance to the city centerthat wewere, in fact, less than thirty miles nowfrom the oak-shaded park where weliked to stop for a picnic lunch.

The three of us ate quietly. Myfather took the pit of a damson plumout of his mouth and dropped it into apaper bag,fluttering his fingers a little.He was wishing hed pressed on toIowa CityCedar Rapids wasnt eventhe halfway pointand I was wishingwe were back in the air-conditionedcar. Cedar Rapids felt like outer space

to me. The warm breeze was someoneelses breeze, not mine, and the sunoverhead was a harsh reminder of thedays relentless waning,and the parksunfamiliar oak trees all spoke to ourdeep nowhereness. Even my motherdidnt have much to say.

But the really interminable drivewas through southeastern Iowa. My

father remarked on the height of thecorn, the blackness of the soil, the needfor better roads. My mother loweredthe front-seat armrest and played crazyeights with me until I was just as sick ofit as she was. Every few miles a pigfarm. Another ninety-degree bend inthe road. Another truck with fifty carsbehind it.Each time my father floored

the accelerator and swung out to pass,my mother drew frightened breath:

Fffff !Ffffffff!FffffFFFFFFFFF!OH! EARL!

OH! Fffffff!There was white sun in the east and

white sun in the west. Aluminumdomes of silos white against white sky.It seemed as if wed been drivingsteadily downhill for hours, careeringtoward an ever-receding green furrinessat the Missouri state line. Terrible thatit could still be afternoon. Terrible thatwe were still in Iowa.We had left

behind the convivial planet where mycousins lived, and we were plummetingsouth toward a quiet, dark, air-conditioned house in which I didnteven recognize loneliness as loneliness,it was so familiar to me.

My father hadnt said a word in fiftymiles.He silently accepted anotherplum from my mother and, a momentlater, handed her the pit. She unrolled

her window and flung the pit into awind suddenly heavy with a smell oftornadoes.What looked like dieselexhaust was rapidlyfilling the southernsky. A darkness gathering at three inthe afternoon.The endless downslopesteepening, the tasselled corn tossing,and everything suddenly greenskygreen, pavement green,parents green.

My father turned on the radio andsorted through crashes of static to finda station. He had rememberedor

maybe never forgottenthat anotherdescent was in progress.There wasstatic on static on static,crazy assaultson the signals integrity, but we couldhear men with Texan accents reportinglower and lower elevations, countingthe mileage down toward zero.Then awall of rain hit our windshield with aroar like deep-fry. Lightningeverywhere.Static smashing the Texanvoices, the rain on our roof louder thanthe thunder,the car shimmying in

lateral gusts.Earl, maybe you should pull over,

my mother said. Earl?He had just passed milepost 2, and

the Texan voices were getting steadier,as if theyd figured out that the staticcouldnt hurt them:that they weregoing to make it.And, indeed, thewipers were already starting to squeak,the road drying out, the black cloudsshearing off into harmless shreds.TheEagle has landed, the radio said. Wedcrossed the state line.We were backhome on the moon.

Jonathan Franzen

ARE WE THERE YET?

COUNTDOWN

SEYMOURCHWAST


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nal.The photographs had that apocalypticfeelthey conveyed a contemporary liv-ing hell.They were brilliant photographs.I think they are still his very best work.

The Serra Pelada photographs helpedSalgado move ahead with an ambitiousidea:to compile a giant almanac of phys-ical labortuna fishermen in Sicily, coalminers in India, and many others. Theproject, whose full title is Workers: AnArcheology of the Industrial Age, tooksix years. It was shot globally (in twenty-six countries) and distributed globally;the pictures were instantly legible, as sadand catchy and broadly appealing as anElton John song. Workers had the se-ductive ambition of comprehensiveness;it wanted to show the whole earth, likethose first, blue shots of the world seen

from space. And by sheer force of com-position, it seemed, Salgado was look-ing tofind coherence in a combination ofsocial optimism and social pessimism.

These were romantic photographs ofwhat the Marxist economist in Salgadoknew to be the exploitation of labor.History is above all a succession of chal-lenges, of repetitions, of perseverances,he wrote in the introduction to the bookin which the photographs were collected.Its an endless cycle of oppressions, hu-miliations,and disasters,but also a testa-ment to mans ability to survive.

Workerswas a feat offinancing asmuch as it was an achievement in thor-oughness, and in sustained seriousness.(Salgado has never taken a photographthat could not be accompanied, in a tele-

vision documentary, by the sound of asolo cello.) He really took charge of hisown career,Jacobson said. He became aproduction person, providing stories onhis own terms. Salgado explained to methat he persuaded several magazines tosign up for the stories in Workers in ad-

vance,so it was possible to cover my bud-

get and produce my stories, completelyfree to produce my stories.No one maga-zine had priority. I organized this. This iseconomics. It has been said that morepeople sawWorkers, in its various trav-elling exhibitions, than any other show inthe history of photography.

Salgado has sometimes had an awk-ward relationship with other photogra-phers. When you produce a lot, you takea lot of space, and people are afraid of

you,he said to me.In the early nineteen-

nineties, as Salgado finished Workersand began his next projecta study ofdisplaced people, known as Migra-tionshis relationship with Magnumended. As he remembered it, Oh boy,a big, big fight. Although the conflictseems to have had its roots in resentmentof Salgados new fame, and his perceivedegotism, it took the particular form ofa disagreement about internal reforms ofMagnum.Salgado had suggested restruc-turing the agency: dividing the photo-

journalists from the art photographers;healso wanted each photographer to make agreater financial investment in the cop-erative.These ideas were resisted.Despitea moment when Cartier-Bresson,then inhis eighties, sought to prevent Salgadofrom leaving a Magnum meeting by bar-ring the way with his body, Salgado re-signed,and formed Amazonas with Llia.I knew that if I dont leave Magnum I

will die, he told me. Not that I will diephysically, but I will die like many of the

old Magnum photographers who weredeadbecause they were not photogra-phers anymore, they were eating eachother, fighting, politics. Because photog-raphers must be out shooting,the planet isthere to do incredible stories, and to seethese photographers sixty years old,sixty-fi ve years old, you know, become com-pletely bitterfor me,that is death.

E

ach day on board Tara, Salgadowoke up early and photographed

all day. He made the claimit seemedimplausible atfirstthat his mind neverwandered. He said that he never day-



Gee, I alwaysfigured him for No. 1!


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dreamed about his family, his taxes, orBrazilian soccer, which he still follows.He was able to look, and do nothingbut look. He said that he saw the worldin black-and-white. (The lettuce,thatsgray, he told me during lunch one day.The pie is pale gray.The wine is black.)Salgado has a recurring irritation in his

left eye, because he keeps it squeezedshut for so much of the time.In Antarctica, the sun still shone at

eleven oclock in the evening, so whenSalgado went onshore he worked longdays. For his companions, who couldmove neither too far ahead nor too far be-hind, for fear of wandering into Salgadosframe, the days sometimes seemed evenlonger. It was like being tied to him by arope. Then, one afternoon, four of usweretied to him by a rope, as we walked

up a gently sloping glacier above a smallBritish base called Port Lockroy, ourboots breaking through a crust of hard iceto the icy mush beneath.Salgado walkedsecond to last in line. He stopped andstarted and stopped again,as he sought tocompensate for the fact that the right sideof the view did not quite do justice to theleft. (Some dark bare rocks interrupted a

white curve of ice.) The four of us werebound to stop and start, too; when helooked at the view,we looked at the same

view.The sky was as clear and blue as theview from an aircraft at thirty thousandfeet. As we moved higher up the glacier,and the scene became more and more toSalgados liking, his tugs on the rope be-came more frequent.He brought us to ahalt as if we were sled dogs. Some hoursinto the walk,we changed order and Sal-gado was given the lead.

Some similar rearranging had hap-pened, on a larger scale, during the firstdays in Antarctica,when one could see a

discrepancy between those who saw thetrip as a vacationor an extreme-sportsadventureand Salgados more medita-tive ideas about travelling.When he wasalone on deck, Salgado would some-times say, The guys below are probablymissing one of the most beautiful thingsof their lives.His intensity,when work-ing, could inspire a kind of shame inones own lack of stamina, and in ones willingness to read and gossip ratherthan at all times commune with thescenery. It was like visiting an art gallerywith someone able to study a single por-trait for a full afternoon. In contrast to

Salgado, the rest of us took photographsthat seemed to be a kind of defenseagainst the unease that can creep intoour response to the sublimea shieldagainst the guilt attached to not know-ing how to fix ones gaze on somethingspectacular that one will never see again.

Salgados shipmates wanted to meet

goals

to get as high above Antarctica aspossible, or as far below, or as far south asthe ice would allow. But they could notlose themselves inside the landscape as hecould.The alpine guide flew low over theboat in an engine-powered paraglider thathe had carried from France. The sailor

with the trumpet played La Vie en Roseloudly on the deck, the sound bouncingoff the icebergs around us. We drankcocktails, listened to reggae, and watchedBourgois take pleasure in the task of nos-

ing Tara through the slabs of ice that werebecoming denser as we moved south.Sal-gado was puzzled by the hurry and noise.Were not here to go on an autoroute,hesaid.So maybe we wont see three things,but we willsee this one thing. In whatseemed a warning about the easygoingmood on board the boat, one day weheard an unnerving exchange over theopen channel on the radioa doctor giv-ing instructions in English to peoplenearby who were evidently caring for

someone very seriously injured. We laterlearned that a British man, a successfulbusinessman sailing his own yacht, haddied after falling down a crevasse at theglacier where we had been roped together.

Salgado also became frustrated by theinfluence that the two men from theFrench TV show were having on Tarasmovements. Salgado liked them person-ally, but their hunger for footage aggra-vated him. One morning, after the shiphad sailed as far down the peninsula as

possible before being stopped by ice, andhad then turned around, we came to asudden stop at the sight of a leopard sealon a low-riding iceberg. One of the TV

men took an inflatable boat to film it.(In the rush to get the dinghy launched,Bourgoiss cousin fell into the water; aftera moment,he was back on deck.) At thetime, Salgado was standing at the bow,studying the way that the light was fall-ing on the ice cliffs.I was concentrating,he later said. With all this ice breaking

in the water, completely different shapeswere forming,and I started to see a hugemegalopolis,a huge town,incredible city,with vertical shapes,with round shapesall geometric forms.I was organizing mymind inside this space, and the light wasso nice,so beautiful,because we had someshafts going inside the ice,and made vol-ume.Then they break for thephoque,andthey destroyed me! (For seal, Salgadoswitched to French, and seemed to enjoyspitting out the word.) It broke com-

pletely my concentration,he said.Salgado went down into the maincabin. We must talk about this, he saidto Bourgois politely. Later that day, at ameeting around the ships dining table,Salgado complained about the perceivedencroachment of the TV shows agenda.(Bourgois had given him the impressionthat he was the only person on board pay-ing for more than living costs, althoughthe French program had, in fact, made asimilar contribution.) He also pressed for

greater environmental seriousness. Wehave to show more respect to the envi-ronment, he said. This is a UNEP boat,an environmental boat,we cant be agitat-ing animals.We cant be making a noise.Salgado was quiet when others spoke;he examined a little dispenser of coloredPost-it tabs being used by the televisiondirector, Gil Kebaili, to mark pages in aglossy book on Antarctica. (There wereseveral of these books on board, but Sal-gado never opened them, being keen to

avoid visual preconceptions: Im com-pletely open for what comes,I have no or-ganized idea.He made an exception onlyfor the work of Frank Hurley, the pho-tographer on Shackletons expedition.)

Salgado had the deck to himself thatafternoon,and a new authority.Tara hadevolved into a taxi. When Kebaili cameup on deck,he did not carry his camera.

P

aging through theMigrationsbookat Taras dining table one morn-

ing, Salgado commented on a double-page photograph of Rwandan refugeesin makeshift tents in Tanzania in 1994,

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and formed the T of a time-out. Hewas done. This is the best photographIve taken so far, he said. Here Ill see what I was looking for when I camehere. One picture I have. Now I onlyneed forty-nine.

W.Eugene Smith,the Lifephotog-

rapher, once acknowledged thathe was always torn between the atti-tude of the journalist, who is a recorderof facts,and the artist,who is often nec-essarily at odds with the facts. Salgadomakes no similar acknowledgment.Imnotan artist,he told me.An artist makesan object. Me, its not an object, I workin history, Im a storyteller.

We were walking through freezingdrizzle on Deception Island, a horseshoeof volcanic rock and ice, a last stopping

point on our way north toward a rendez-vous at the peninsulas sole,gravel airstrip,on King George Island,where a plane wasdue to pick up Bourgois and a few others,including myself.I can be an artist a pos-teriori, not a priori, Salgado said. If mypictures tell the story, our story, humanstory, then in a hundred years, then theycan be considered an art reference, butnow they are not made as art. Im a jour-nalist. My lifes on the road, my studio isthe planet. He recalled a carved pot for

grain storage that he had recently seen inan exhibition of African art. It was so

well carved, so well done. It was not builtas art, it was built for their life,and becameart. I believe the pictures that I do are thesame thing. They have a function. I tella story. Im telling about the shit of thisplanet,or we will not survive as a people.

When Salgado,who is forever in searchof beauty, insists on being understoodonly as a reporter, he risks sounding likeKeats claiming no more than an ornitho-

logical interest in nightingalesand per-haps heshould not be taken too seriously.But while there is a kind of modesty inthe stance,there is also a hint of immod-esty in imagining that ones singular visionof the world will be accepted as transpar-ent and purely practicalalthough Sal-gado has always been helped in that claimby his audiences knowledge that he is aformer economist who takes his politicsseriously. (For example, the critic DavidLevi Strauss has written that Salgados

work is substantially different from mostsocial documentary work, owing to hisbackground in Brazil and his understand-

under a sky that looked almost black insome areas, and almost white in others.The situation is unbelievable, and thelight is unbelievable,he said,softly, andthe adjective had to make a suddenchange in complexion between its twoappearances.

It is often said that photographers like

Salgado run a risk when they turn povertyand discomfort into well-composed im-ages. According to this line of criticism,the beauty of a Salgado photograph cansmother,or cheapen,the human woe rep-resented. (Salgado finds this responsemaddening, and once considered hiringa lawyer after such an attack was pub-lished.) A related argument takes issue

with such photographs migrating fromtheir traditional places of distributionthat is, magazines and newspapersto

lose their captions and become a com-modity traded in galleries,bought by mu-seums, and hung above water beds inpenthouse apartments.In one of the leastguarded of these kinds of complaint, LeMondeonce described a Paris exhibitionof Salgados Migrationsphotographs asnauseating and kitsch, in an articlethat ran under the headline SALGADO,ORTHE EXPLOITATIONOF COMPASSION.(They were trying to kill him,Llia saidto me.) In response, Salgado insists that

his photographs are not as calculated ashis critics imagine. I dont know how tomake an un-composition, if there is this

word in English,he said to me.It comesnaturally. That must be very hard, themost hard thing in the planet.You workin a space! You have a space, you mustdeal with it, you must have some har-mony in this space.

Salgadowho does sell prints, but inunlimited editions,with the exception of aplanned edition ofGenesis prints, and

who has always aimed for as wide a distri-bution of his images as possiblesug-gested to me that his Brazilian birth pro-tects him from some of the issues ofconscience that may trouble photojour-nalists from First World countries. Bycontrast,he said,a British photojournalistsuch as Don McCullin, whom Salgadoadmires, must take into account that hecomes from a country that went to India,

went to Africa, and the British owe adebt, for what they did around the world.He continued, When I was young andpart of the Communist Party,we worked

very close to the part of the society that

was less privileged in Brazil. I come fromthis. And when I show these pictures Imshowing a problem that I am inside.AndI never made money with these things.

The money went back into photography,or into social projects. (Salgado appearsto be far less materialistic than his earn-ing power could permit,beyond showing

a warm appreciation of well-made thingsthat allow him to function more efficientlyin his work.When I asked him to tell meabout the extravagances in his life, hethought for a while and then said, I haveabout twenty penknives.)

The afternoon after the chastening ofthe TV crew, Tara was cruising on stillwater when Salgado looked down a sidechannel that ended in a glacier and askedthat the ship be turned into it. Therewere, in fact, glaciers in every direction,

but Salgado was struck by something inthe combination of the ice, the moun-tains that framed it, the clouds hangingonto the mountains, and the dark gray ofthe sea directly in front of the ice cliffs.Given the clarity of the dry air, and theabsence of people (we saw perhaps a sin-gle boat a day) and almost all plant andanimal life, it was difficult to judge dis-tances; it seemed possible that the photo-graph Salgado envisaged could be takenat a spot a few miles away.

As we moved toward the glacier, thetemperature fell and the wind rose fromnothing to forty knots. The sea turnedchoppy.What had felt like a bracing dayat the top of a ski lift took on a threat-ening texture.Salgado was thrilled.Thelight wasflat,flat,but now were in orbit,he said, after taking a picture.

The cold became extreme; the windscreamed off the glacier. Oh, what amagnificent thing! Salgado said, guid-ing the captain, who was standing sev-

enty feet behind him, with mittenedhands, like an airport worker guiding ajet to a gate.The sea in front had turnedalmost black. The wind cut through adozen layers of clothes. Salgados noseran, and he could barely move hisfingerswhen he changed films;the cold crackedthe skin around his fingernails.

The glacier was, in fact, many milesaway. We sailed until we were directlyunder jagged hundred-and-fifty-footice cliffs. Then Salgado shouted, Stop,stop.The wind dropped suddenlywewere now sheltered by the cliffsandSalgado raised his hands above his head,

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ing,as an economist,of the social and po-litical background of the people and situ-ations he photographs.)

Just as Workers and Migrationsdid not have explicit political messagesbut,rather, seemed to have bold compen-diousness as their governing principles,the agenda of Genesis is somewhat

opaque.Salgado is ecologically serious,asthe Instituto Terra suggests,but it wouldworry some environmentalists to hear himtake encouragement from the sheer abun-dance of glaciers in Antarctica. (Whereothers see shrinking ice, Salgado saw aton of ice.) Salgado has said that Gene-siswill include photographs not just ofanimals but of people living technologi-cally simple lives in the Amazon basinand elsewhere. He told me that he wasaiming to show the earth as it was some

four thousand years agoalthough it wasnot clear why he had chosen that daterather than,say, forty thousand years ago.Its not yet obvious what Genesis is,andhow it will not be Plante Cousteau;and it seems significant that when theGuardian, for example, has run these newphotographs the accompanying story hasbeen about Salgados visit to the place.

Travelling to the ends of the earth,he be-comes the center of attention.

The truth,of course,is that Salgado s

work has an emotional impactnot leastin its underlying argument for a senseof common humanity, or common ani-malitythat is separate from its infor-mational load. (This fact is acknowl-edged when Salgado publishes captionsat the back of his books, rather thanagainst each image.) One can know theSerra Pelada photographs well but stillbe surprised when Salgado talks aboutthe actual daily routine, and the socialbackground, of those miners. And its

interesting to see the contact sheets fromthat story, neatlyfiled among the othersin Paris.The most famous Serra Peladaphotographperhaps the best-knownSalgado photographis one that is re-ferred to in his office as The Hand. Aminer has reached the top of a ladder,with a sack of dirt on his back, and thepit below him. He is pulling himself upthe last step. The hand of another manis reaching into the frame, apparentlyin the direction of the straining miner, ina way that echoes an older composition,on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.(Ah d h tf h t

the miner struggling up the slope, flat-tened by his burden,Eduardo Galeanowrote in an essay for a 1990 Salgado ret-rospective.) But its odd to learn from thecomic strip of before-and-after providedby the contact sheet that the stray hand isnot actually reaching; its the hand ofsomeone walking ahead of the subject,

caught mid-swing.As we walked on Deception Island,through the mist, Salgado talked aboutSerra Peladaa fairly large group ofthose miners were raising money for sexchanges, he saidand then, in a relaxed,pre-photograph mood, he led the groupinCucurrucucPaloma, the traditionalMexican song performed by Caetano Ve-loso in the Pedro Almdovar film Talkto Her. (Veloso is a friend.) At midday,he did an interview with French radio

via the satellite telephone, which he oth-erwise used to call Llia each evening.When he finished, we turned a corner tofind that we were looking along a ridgethat curved up and around in the shape ofa Nike swoosh flipped upside down; oneside of the ridge rose gently from a long,broad valley, and the other swept steeplydown to a beach of black sand.All acrossthe valley, and along the ridge, chinstrappenguins were standing on pebble nestsevenly spaced a foot or so from each

other, in colonies of a hundred or fivehundred or a thousand, like subdivisionsin a suburban sprawl.We could see per-haps two hundred and fifty thousand

birds. Amazing, said Salgado,more ex-cited than Id seen him before.

Part of the appeal of penguins is thatthey choose to live where people wouldlive if they colonized the same space,andthey live on the ground,and they walk at ahuman pace. Looking over the valley, wecould see countless birds making their way

down paths to the sea; small paths led towider ones,and these emptied into a mainthoroughfare that took the birds down tothe beach, where they dived into the surfto fish, becoming as agile as dolphins.Each wave slung onto the sand a dozen orso penguins that had finished feeding; asthey came out of the water they immedi-ately lost their marine grace, and thenbegan struggling up the same paths to re-turn to their nests.Thousands were mov-ing in each direction. The noise of their

screeching echoed across the valleythesound of a hall with a high ceiling packedwith people shouting. The Serra Peladaof penguins, Salgado said, making theunavoidable comparison,even at the slightmoral risk of connecting Brazilian laborers

with flightless seabirds. Never in my lifehave I seen something so beautiful. In-credible, incredible, incredible.He raisedhis arms in front of the view, and saidsomething I didnt catch, and then ex-plained,It was a voodoo word.Im asking

for light. Im asking for this mist to open,asking nature to open for me, because Ineed the light. It will come.When it did,he said,Thank you,God. o

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Parker Salgado