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OK,
so breakfast is a bit of a misnomer. More like coffee and crumpets
for 20. The occasion was a morning workshop put on by
FotoVision.org,
a San Francisco Bay Area based non-profit organization dedicated to
helping documentary photographers create, edit, fund and distribute
their work worldwide.
Founded by
multi-award winning social documentary photography Ken Light and
former Cartier-Bresson assistant and Magnum photo editor Michelle
Vignes, Fotovision hosts regular workshops covering virtually every
aspect of documentary photography. In addition to Salgado, the
highly notable likes of Eugene Richards, James Nachtwey and Don
McCullin have also conducted Fotovision workshops.
And so we were
gathered at “the feet of the master” in a small studio across the
street from Pixar Animation; a gaggle of ‘emerging’ photographers
joined by Pulitzer Prize winning snapper Kim Komenich of the San
Francisco Chronicle. Also present were Ken and Melanie Light, (Fotovision’s
Director), renowned photo editor and longtime Salgado collaborator
Fred Ritchin of Pixelpress.org, and a small film crew.
I sit directly down the long rectangular table from Salgado; he is
at the head, I at the ass end, a perfect juxtaposition of our skill
levels. He looks good, a vibrant 60, blue eyes shining under a white
baseball cap that covers his perfectly baldpate. After a brief
introduction Sebastiao, good naturedly, informs us that he has never
conducted a workshop and has little idea of where to start. So he
asks us to begin by asking him questions.
And so we do. And will for the next three hours. His answers come
thoughtfully, forthrightly, engagingly, lengthily. His English,
though virtually fluent, is spoken with a Brazilian Portuguese
accent tinged in Parisian, and is not always easy to follow. The
film crew is ever lurking, the soundman perpetually swinging his
fuzzy, stuffed animal (windscreen) of a mike over our heads. The
wind, to the best of my meteorological abilities, is coming out of
nowhere at zero kilometers per hour.
First up is a 30-something photojournalism teacher, a liberal
intellectual type who poses a rather labyrinthine question, or group
of questions, most of which he answers for himself. I cannot recall
the first exactly, but the gist is essentially philosophical, what
is your philosophy as an artist. The gist of Salgado’s answer is, “I
am not an artist and so I have no philosophy as one.”
Next!
Even though Sebastiao masks it well—his actual answer is not so curt
of course—one senses that he’s dealt with these types before—my God
he lives in Paris—and has a certain level of disdain for the
over-intellectualization of photography. The journo profs
continuance amounts to pointing out a common criticism—a thorn in
Salgado’s side as Fred Ritchin lets be known—that he makes beautiful
pictures of people suffering, that he somehow romanticizes and even
exploits it. What do you say to these critics?
I paraphrase:
Salgado:
Here I am 20 years later and people are still talking about
Sahel, (his powerful 1984 book documenting the mass starvation in
Africa's Sahel desert region) reprinting Sahel, and of course it’s topical
again since the ongoing tragedy in Darfur. If I did not make these
pictures with good light and good composition, if they were not
compelling, how would they now be contributing to the discussion
about Darfur? The information from the Sahel book keeps
circulating because the pictures are well made.
Eduardo Galeano, who along with Ritchin wrote essays that appear in
Salgado’s An Uncertain Grace, explains it thus:
Galeano:
Salgado's photographs, a multiple portrait of human pain, at the
same time invite us to celebrate the dignity of humankind. Brutally
frank, these images of hunger and suffering are yet respectful and
seemly. Salgado sometimes shows skeletons, almost corpses, with
dignity - all that is left to them. They have been stripped of
everything but they have dignity. That is the source of their
ineffable beauty… That instant of trapped light that gleam-in the
photographs reveals to us what is unseen, what is seen but
unnoticed; an unperceived presence, a powerful absence. It shows us
that concealed within the pain of living and the tragedy of dying
there is a potent magic, a luminous mystery that redeems the human
adventure in the world.
A young woman, who’s worked with Steve McCurry in Tibet, asks about
coping with the emotional aspects of photographing in such
conditions, and if he ever questions himself. Fred Ritchen steps in.
Ritchin:
People often assume—wrongly—that Sebastiao has to stay detached
from the suffering, otherwise how can he cope with it. And this
goes to the heart of who he is as a photographer and as a man. The
last thing he wants to be is detached.
Salgado:
Detachment is disaster for the documentary photographer. You must
live within the situation, let it become your real life, share with
the people what they are going through the best you can. Do I
question myself? No, because all my ethical concerns have been
decided ahead of time. There can be no room for doubt. You don’t go
to take anything from anybody or to exploit them. You don’t “take”
pictures, you make pictures; you make them well and use them to
communicate, to help the people and the situation. Many times the
suffering people in the Sahel would see me working and they would
ask me to come and photograph them or a loved one as a way of
helping to solve the problem. In time they come to your camera like
they would come to a microphone, they come to speak through your
lens.
His famous use of light is “part of who I am”, says Salgado. Raised
on an Amazonian cattle ranch, with dust and smoke resulting in
diffuse light, and with simple structures allowing mostly
chiaroscuro lighting situations indoors, this was the medium through
which he came to see the world. He knows it and knows how to work
with it. He will often shoot against the light, even overexposing
his Tri-X up to five stops!
Salgado holds up his Workers book, just one of several
multi-year projects, shuffling through the pages until he finds the
famous photo of an oil worker in Kuwait after Gulf War 1. The man is
seated and slumped and covered in crude, having spent a long day
under black skies putting out oil fires. It’s about an 8 x12 inch
image, without an unusual amount of grain. We guess the ISO was 400.
Wrong! In actuality it was shot at 3200. The reason for so little
grain was that the subject and the background were almost entirely
black and white, with little by way of gray tones.
By this time I am stepping on Komenich’s Pulitzer feet and snapping
off a few shots with my new digital Nikon. Salgado is not a fan of
the digital camera. Nor is Ritchin, who, being a photo editor
prefers to see the evolution of an image—and a photographer—frame by
frame. The fact that digital images are so often destroyed on the
spot is bothersome to him. He goes on to say how sometimes an image
can remain on a contact sheet, overlooked for decades before being
“discovered”. Salgado’s own documentary archive exceeds half a
million images.
Karen Ande of
andephotos.com,
who documents the AIDS crisis in Africa, asks the question I was
about to ask. I paraphrase:
Ande:
Given the number of intense and emotionally delicate situations
you’ve put yourself in, you must have a special way of getting
people to accept you and your camera. People dying, their loved ones
suffering are not always happy to see a lens pointing at them.
Salgado:
This is very true, and so you must always have asked permission. Not
for each time you click the shutter necessarily, but to be a part of
the situation in the first place. When you first arrive it’s
important to get introductions. If you go to a village or a factory
or into the fields or a feeding center in the desert, you must get
introduced or introduce yourself to whomever it is that can give
permission in that situation. Explain yourself in a way that makes
your being there important for them. It’s one thing to make ‘street
shots’ here and there, but to tell a story you must get inside the
story and live with the story, in a sense becoming part of he
community. This also allows you to know when
not to be pointing your camera, when it would not be appropriate.
There are times I do not make the picture, out of respect for the
people and the moment.
With this Salgado draws a Bell curve on a pad of paper. The bottom
of the near curve is where you--the photographer--approach and first
enter a given situation. Here on the street you may be using a
longish lens. Then you make your introductions. You explain yourself
and most importantly, get permission.
At first the shooting can be very difficult, a steep, slow trudge up
the curve. But after a few days or a week, as people become
accustomed to you and your camera, you climb the curve more
steadily. As you get deeper into the story your lens gets shorter.
The pictures get better. When you approach the apex of the curve,
there is less gravity working against you. The people have accepted
you and dropped their defenses. The story enters its climax stage at
the top of the curve and you are now using your shortest lens and
making your best pictures. Inevitably you begin to sense a natural
drop off; the story winds down. Traversing down the other side of
the curve is a bit like cuddling and having a cigarette after sex.
Gradually, and as gracefully as possible then, you extricate
yourself from the bed of the story, giving your thanks and saying
your goodbyes, while your lens (and here we must depart form the sex
analogy) is once again getting longer.
Galeano:
Salgado photographs people. Casual photographers photograph
phantoms… Consumer-society photographers approach but do not enter.
In hurried visits to scenes of despair or violence, they climb out
of the plane or helicopter, press the shutter release, explode the
flash: they shoot and run. They have looked without seeing and their
images say nothing.
We spend a fair amount of time discussing the “framing” of a
documentary project. In other words, know what you want to do, what
your project is going to be about, and that your reasons for doing
it are very important to you. If they are not, the difficulties of
any given situation may overcome your dedication to it, and your
work will reflect it.
Do as much research as you can. Wherever possible, develop contacts
for your introductions ahead of time. Again, know the heart of the
story you plan to tell with your photographs. Of course you cannot
know the specifics; these will take care of themselves. And of
course, things are never as you expect them on the ground, so you
must also be nimble and prepared to make adjustments. Keep your eyes
and your mind open, but at the same time stay focused on the main
threads of your story. Otherwise you may think things are going
well, only to return home and discover that somewhere along the way
you lost your story, and are left with only a few nice pictures.
Fred Ritchin talks about some lesser-known aspects of Salgado. About
how they worked together on a project to eliminate polio worldwide,
which has been very successful if not 100% so. Yet. He mentions how
Salgado donates time and money to Medicines Sans Frontiers (MSF)
and other groups helping the developing world. How he has
rehabilitated rainforest in the Amazon where he grew up. How his
current project, Genesis, is a risk and a departure from his
previous work, and that he is learning a new medium format camera
specifically for it.
The genesis of Genesis was Migrations, or rather the
despair he felt at the he end of the project. He saw so much
destruction of the environment, so much greed leading to human
displacement and intractable poverty in the second and third worlds
that his faith in humanity was badly waning. He wanted to address
the reasons for this loss of faith in a way that would help to
restore it, both for him and others. Like all his other major works,
this project will take several years; he estimates seven. It is
these multi-year projects that set Salgado apart from other great
documentary photographers.
Salgado:
I conceived this project as a potential path towards humanity's
rediscovery of itself in nature. I have named it Genesis because, as
far as possible, I want to return to the beginnings of our planet:
to the air, water and fire that gave birth to life; to the animal
species that have resisted domestication and are still "wild"; to
the remote tribes whose "primitive" way of life is largely
untouched; and to surviving examples of the earliest forms of human
settlement and organization. This voyage represents a form of
planetary anthropology. Yet it is also designed to propose that this
uncontaminated world must be preserved and, where possible, be
expanded so that development is not automatically commensurate with
destruction.
Our breakfast with Salgado is over before we know it, and it’s time
for lunch without him. Fred will continue the workshop after the
break. Outside, still in something of a daze of icon envy, I spot
Sebastiao heading down the block and resist the urge to run after
him. He is off across the bay where he will be giving a fund raising
speech later that night. To think that the best ‘pure’ documentary
photographer on the planet still has to work at raising money for
his projects is more than a bit daunting. Seven-year projects are
not easily funded of course, but the price of his well-earned
emancipation from assignment work pays for itself in many other
ways. Most importantly, it gives him the freedom to express the
world he sees to the world at large, to speak directly through his
lens without having to endure a bad translation from some editor
sitting behind a desk in New York or Paris. There will be plenty of
that after the fact, when the photo-intellectuals swoop down to feed
and then regurgitate to the public what they are so often incapable of
fully digesting.
~Bennett Stevens
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