Humanity, in focus
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A refugee camp in Benako, Tanzania swells with Rwandan refugees in 1994, but amid the desolation and despair, the shining face of a child gazes adoringly at her mother. (Sebastiao Salgado/ Amazonas Images)
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Humanity, in focus
Long before the refugee crisis in Europe, documentary photographer Sebastiao Salgado captured the plight of the dispossessed in places such as Burundi, Bosnia and Mexico. His projects, as he explains to Dr. Anthony Feinstein, often took years to complete and at times left him physically and emotionally drained [/center]
Sebastiao Salgado’s answers to my questions have a lot in common with his photographs. There is a depth to both, the richness of his images with their subtle gradations of shadow and light paralleled by his nuanced and carefully shaped replies.
Long before Syrian refugees by the thousands began putting their faith in callous human traffickers to deliver them to a safer, ambivalent Europe, Salgado published a book called Migrations, documenting the movement of people across the globe. There is one photograph in particular that I want him to talk about, a touching image of a mother and child taken in a refugee camp in Tanzania. But before we can get to the specifics of the image, Salgado begins with the bigger picture of why he became interested in migrations and how he found his way to Tanzania and regions beyond.
A photographer known to spend years on a project exploring a single theme, he makes clear in conversation that his interests, while sparked initially by curiosity, are developed patiently over time, giving his body of work a unity that spans his four decades in the field. His Migrations project did not arise de novo, and to appreciate its depth – its lineage, as it were – one cannot parachute in by starting a discussion on a single photograph, no matter how powerful the image. The groundwork has to be laid first.
Salgado, who is Brazilian, starts with a historical synopsis linking his country to Africa. From there, he moves on divulging that he once trained as an economist and, as an advisor to the World Bank in the 1970s, travelled a lot to Africa, bringing him into contact with post-colonial governments in Mozambique and Angola. From this vantage point, he was witness to market forces in a pre-globalization era that were not only driving rural populations into the cities, but also exploiting their labour in the process.
More:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/humanitys-spirit-and-cruelty-in-focus/article26454376/
