Sebastião Salgado's Workers and the Photography of Social Justice

Introduction

There is a set of photographs taken by Sebastião Salgado that reveals both who Salgado is and why he dedicates his career to documenting the plight of workers around the world. The images are set in a gold mine in Brazil called Serra Pelada — a vast pit where people toil daily to dig gold from the mud using the most basic of tools: picks and shovels. The loosened mud is loaded into wicker baskets weighing between "30 and 60 kilograms" (Stallabrass), or roughly 65 to 130 pounds, which are then carried up wooden ladders approximately 50 feet tall. Workers make as many as 60 such trips per day (Stallabrass), and for each trip a worker is paid the equivalent of 20 United States cents on average.

The photographs Salgado took at Serra Pelada range from intimate close-ups to sweeping wide shots. He wished to show viewers both the enormity of the undertaking and the humanity of the people performing it. This is not some ancient mine where conquered peoples were driven to labor as slaves — these photographs were taken in the 1980s, and they resonate with a feeling of disbelief. It is difficult for those who live within a modernist, neoliberal worldview to fathom that such places still exist. Unfortunately, they do, and Sebastião Salgado has taken it upon himself to document this reality — to show that while some parts of the world may have moved past such apparent slave labor, most of the globe's workers still endure harsh conditions.

This paper examines the life of Sebastião Salgado, explores how photography has functioned as an instrument of social justice, and analyzes the impact of his landmark book Workers and its photographs in capturing the social injustice faced by workers in the twentieth century.

Biography of Sebastião Salgado

The photographer in question was not always a photojournalist. Sebastião Salgado was once an economist — closer in worldview to the extreme capitalists he would later confront through his lens than to the social activist he became. He was born in a small village on the edge of a large forest in Brazil. The region was once among the most densely forested areas in the country, but slash-and-burn farming techniques have since reduced it to less than 0.3% of its former verdure. Because the village was small, it offered limited educational opportunities, and Salgado had to travel more than one hundred miles away to complete his secondary education. Over the following decade he continued moving, married in 1967, and pursued advanced studies, ultimately completing a doctorate in economics in 1971 in Paris. From there he went to work for the International Coffee Organization in London — the beginning of what appeared to be a brilliant career in economics (The Guardian).

Then something happened to derail those plans. While traveling to Africa on assignments for the World Bank, Salgado borrowed his wife's camera and began photographing the workers and scenes he encountered. That moment changed his life. In 1973, he gave up economics and committed himself full time to working as a photographic chronicler of the world (Bakre). He and his family moved back to Paris, where he began working for a studio called Gamma. "In 1979 Sebastião left Gamma and joined Magnum Photos, where he would stay for 15 years. Along with many reportages in several countries for a variety of European and American magazines, in 1984 he finished his work on the Indians and peasants of Latin America" (The Guardian). These subjects became a lasting passion as he continued to chronicle the plight of downtrodden workers across the globe.

His greatest project was undoubtedly the one published as the book Workers (Bakre). The photographs in the book compiled more than a decade of work and depicted laborers from around the world. It was this publication that brought Salgado the enormous worldwide recognition he enjoys to this day — recognition that has, in turn, allowed him to continue pursuing his passion for documenting how the majority of people on earth actually live.

How Photographic Work Serves Social Justice

Salgado was not the first person to attempt to document how workers around the world are exploited for pennies a day. He is one in a long line of men and women who have worked to expose social injustice — but he is among the first to venture to virtually every region of the globe to do so.

Early depictions of the abuses suffered by the lower classes under capitalist systems can be found in paintings, woodcuts, and sculptures from nineteenth-century Europe. These works showed a peasant class in some of the world's wealthiest nations — people working as chimney sweeps, for instance, so that the homes of London and Paris could remain heated (Crow). Such people were immortalized by authors like Charles Dickens, but they also appeared in paintings showing them begging for bread and, later, in early photographs. The urban poor of the great capitalist cities were portrayed much as serfs had been in earlier centuries. For many in the merchant and upper classes, whose carriages rarely passed through slums or poor farms, these depictions were a genuine shock.

Conclusion

Sebastião Salgado continues to make the rest of the world aware of how the poorest live. For people in the Western world to think that they are not rich is to insult those who work for a few dollars a day to carry hundred-pound packs of earth on their backs as they climb ladders out of a pit. Social injustice is a fact of life, but that does not mean that efforts to improve the lives of those facing injustice should not be made. Through his lens — and through the eyes of those living within these conditions — Salgado tries to illuminate injustice that many would otherwise never notice.