Real Clicks
The works of Sebastiao Salgado.

By James Gardner, art reviewer for the New York Post & National Review
August 4-5, 2001

E-mail Mr. Gardner Printer-Friendly E-mail a Friend

ore than anyone else alive, the Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Salgado is the tireless and committed chronicler of Hell on Earth. He has traveled the world, from Bombay and Ho Chi Minh City to Chechnya and the wilds of the Amazon, in order to record, in grainy black and white images, the countless victims of famine and drought, of plague, oppression, and persecution.

Now a new show of his, Migrations, has opened at the International Center of Photography in Midtown Manhattan, accompanied by a massive book of the same title, published by Aperture and selling for $100. The show is divided into four parts, consecrated to Asia, Africa, South America, and Central Europe. In total, more than 400 heart-wrenching images bear directly or tangentially on those mass migrations that, Salgado seems to suggest, are the defining feature of the world we live in.

These images appear in such staggering abundance, however, that in due course, and in spite of their power, the eye, the mind, and the heart become dulled to so many scenes of children huddled in train stations or old men squatting amid the ruins of once prosperous cities. Everything is gray in Salgado's world, and everything is covered over in barbed wire.

Salgado, whose images have frequently appeared in the New York Times Magazine, is the foremost example of what has come to be known as "concerned photography." Today, more than ever before, the photojournalism with which he is identified has parted company with art photography. While all photography once sought, in the main, to record reality, to transcribe faithfully the image before the camera's lens, now art photography has largely turned its back on such truth telling and on photography's unparalleled potential to capture reality.

A good example of this, by the way, is a worthy exhibition of portraits by Hiroshi Sugimoto that has just opened at the Guggenheim Museum in Soho. In it, we see what appear to be straightforward images of Lady Di, Yasser Arafat, and Winston Churchill. And yet there is an unreal stillness in the eyes. In fact, Sugimoto, as so often in the past, is playing a game on us. The images are really records of wax figures in the collection of Madame Tussaud.

But at least they are accurate records. Much of postmodern art photography really consists in little more than monkeying with an image to such a degree that the result is closer to painting than to retinal reality.

Far different is photojournalism, especially the kind practiced by Salgado. Its paramount charm, if that is the word, consists in its ability to serve as a substitute for actual experience. The most common kind of photojournalism, of course, is the sort of routine image of Bush shaking hands with a head of state, such as appears above the fold on page one of our daily papers. But Salgado's goal is not merely to record, but also to advocate and enlighten and even, though he might deny it, to dazzle us with his artistic bravura.

Though the phrase "concerned photography" seems positively to reek of political correctness, it merely describes the kind of photography that men like W. Eugene Smith regularly contributed to Life magazine through the 1940's, a mid-cult, often melodramatic art that will come nigh to bathos in its determination, if not to inspire the viewer to action, at least to make him admire its pictorial rhetoric.

Like so much contemporary culture, Salgado's art is for the consumption of people very different from those depicted in it. Though it relentlessly chronicles the plight of people in the third world (and in the second world, technically speaking, if you count images of Bosnia and Chechnya) it is really created for viewers in the first world. These are images of daily occurrences that most of us will never see. This fact adds a touch, though only a touch, of falseness and facile insincerity to some of these images, not to mention much of the photojournalism to which they are related.

But if Salgado's art is not entirely exempt from patness and histrionics, that does not alter the fact that he is quite probably the best in the world at what he has chosen to do.