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SEBASTIÃO SALGADO WHITE POWER BLACK AND
Earlier this year, Les Franciscaines presented an exhibition by the photographer Sebastião Salgado that plunged visitors into the oeuvre of an artist who has left his mark on the world through the power of his black-and-white photographs, writes Stephen Hitchins
Opposite page
Mudman, Paya, Western Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea, 2008
DEAUVILLE: THE name conjures up slim, elegant women walking along the wide, weathered boardwalk, one hand holding a parasol, the other restraining a dog at the end of a leash. Te parasols are gone now, the glory days passed with the war, yet Deauville perseveres: an immaculate seaside town in France’s Normandy region that is adorned with wonderful seasonal flower arrangements throughout the year. Les Franciscaines, a renovated convent in
the town located five minutes’ walk from both the beach and the hippodrome, is at the heart of Deauville. A building that had lived many lives before becoming a cultural hub for the town, it was here that earlier in the year, the works of one of the great photographers, the Brazilian Sebastião Salgado, were shown. Te building’s layout is deliberately
simple, articulated around a large vertical axis and a large horizontal plane, making it easy for visitors to find their way around. Te flow of visitors through the interconnected spaces is certainly one of enjoyment, pleasure, discovery and exploration. It is a
place where people clearly like to linger. And linger they certainly did with Sebastião Salgado. If any mystery was wrapped in an
enigma, it was and still is Amazonia, but Salgado helped the rest of the world to comprehend what is happening there. His was a culture of encounter, making us confront people and places when we have no idea about their existence at all. He opened our eyes, but in so doing he became a polarising figure. He upended expectations about what photography can do – to become a voice, time and time again – demonstrating a determination to prove that photography was every bit equal to any other art. An aesthete of misery, a master behind the lens, Salgado’s vision of unblemished nature and humanity nevertheless came in for considerable criticism. Discomfort over his representation of the Brazilian jungle, objectification of indigenous people, naked women and children, only made one remember John Stuart Mill, who warned that ‘he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that’.
Te exhibition in Deauville also included
an ode to the birth of time, what Salgado called Genesis. Tis was a major project launched by the photographer in 2004. His wife, Lélia Wanick Salgado, said: ‘Over the next eight years he made 32 trips to the ends of the earth, from the Galapagos to the Amazon rainforest, across Africa and the Arctic. It was a quest to find the origins of the world, a world that evolved for millennia before having to face the pace of modern life… [Te photographs he made] of landscapes, animals and peoples are an escape from the contemporary world. Tey pay tribute to vast, distant regions, pristine and silent, where nature continues to reign in majesty… Tey pay homage to the fragility of the planet.’ Over two years in planning, the
exhibition was curated by Pascal Hoël, and designed, as part of the France-Brazil year in partnership, with the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, home to France’s most important collection of contemporary photography. Born in Minas Gerais in Brazil in 1944, Salgado met Lélia when he was 17. He read
PHOTO: PHILIP VILE
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