photo by Mark Bussell
The following interview of Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado is edited from an interview with Carole Naggar in New York on March 29, 2000 and includes comments from a talk by the photographer two days earlier.
Why did you start the Migrations project?
The Migrations project is the continuation of my previous project Workers. It is the second chapter of the same story. While I was shooting Workers over six or seven years, I saw that we were inside a total transformation of the ways of production. With the end of the first industrial revolution and the arrival of the new technology--intelligent machines--on the line of production, with the new organization of factors of production, I saw that human beings and their traditional, sedentary way of life were also beginning to transform.
By millions, workers are put out of work by mass production, pushed out of the fields, from regions to other regions. They come into towns for jobs. Each year this migration amounts to 120 million field workers, ten times the population of a city like New York. In industry and service it's about the same.
It used to be that most of the population lived in the fields, but we made a complete reversal: the world has become urban. Cities like Paris, New York and London, these are the towns of the past. The towns of the future are Bombay, Mexico, Manila, Jakarta, São Paulo. They used to have 4 or 5 million people, now they have fifteen. More than 150 towns in India now have more than a million people.
In Brazil for instance there used to be hundreds of farms with several hundred thousand families living on them. Now there is one single big farm with machinery and only one family living on it full time. Workers come in part of the year. Oranges are pressed on the farm, the juice is put into refrigerated trucks and ships and at nine o'clock on Monday it is on the American breakfast table.
On a personal level, migration is a story that I know quite well: I was born on a farm in Brazil. When I was five years old I came to a city to live. When I was fifteen years old I left my small city for a middle-sized town of one hundred twenty thousand people. When I got married to my wife Lélia twenty-two years ago we went to live in São Paulo. Then, for political reasons, it was necessary for us to abandon our country for France. And today, thirty-one years later, I continue to be a foreign person living in a foreign country.
What do you hope to accomplish with this project?
I am not a judge of what's good or what's bad. My pictures are only a cross-section of what happens through this cycle of displacement and migration. For seven years I have traveled to 47 different countries and I probably have pictures from 39 or 40 countries. I shoot globally and I want to show globally: each of my stories is about globalization, a sample of human condition on the planet today.
My big hope is to aid and provoke a debate so that we can discuss the human condition looking from the point of view of displaced people around the world. My photographs are like a vector that link what is happening and give the person who does not have the opportunity to go there the possibility to look. I hope that the person who comes into my show and the person who comes out are not quite the same.
I believe that the way the rich countries in the world live is the right way to live. Any person has the right to have health, education, social assistance, the right and need to be a citizen. I believe that each human being on this planet must have the same. And interestingly, we have enough resources to make a better world for each of us.
What is the relationship of this body of work with your previous work?
All my work is linked together like different chapters of the same story: my pictures of Latin American peasants' fight for survival, my pictures of Sahel, those of the refugees and displaced populations, those about workers, they are all about human beings fighting for their dignity and trying to live better together. I am trying to be coherent with this small moment in the planet where I live, and in the end my pictures are a way of life.
I am not more or less pessimistic now, but I am more realistic. I used to think that evolution meant evolution in a positive sense, that we were going towards a better way of life, better relations. Today I understand human behavior a little bit better and I think that evolution can also go in a negative sense. I believe that human beings' real intelligence is their capacity of adaptation to any condition.
I saw such hard things happening that I sometimes wonder if the real meaning of life may not be to be an individual, to be alone, to be violent. I am not sure anymore if human beings are really made to live in a community, or if we can survive as a species.
Specimens much bigger and stronger than us physically have lived a few hundred million years and then disappeared. Who knows if we will stay for ever? This is the real meaning of all the photographs I have taken: will these people I saw and photographed be extinct, or survive?
What do you think the average person can do to help?
I believe that the average person can help a lot, not by giving material goods but by giving their participation, by coming to a discussion, by being really preoccupied with what's going on. It is the most important thing that we can do so that things never happen again in this way.
There is a relationship between the poverty around the world and our destruction of the environment. One of the reasons that there is so much poverty is the direct link between the structure of the environment and the population growth.
We do not protect our own environment and we have destroyed the forest in most of the tropical countries. In Brazil for instance, by deforestation, by cutting and exporting the wood, by the cattle ranches, by exploiting the mines, we are killing the forest which is the Indian civilization, and the Indians are dying.
With my wife Lélia and a group of friends in Brazil, we fight very hard for the rain forest in the region where I was born. We fight to get the funds to construct a school for the training of primary school teachers, agriculture technicians, farmers and politicians.We are planting 5.1 million trees. It is a big laboratory to contribute to restore the planet in these areas where it is destroyed. Of course we need help on this, discussions and any kind of donation that can plant a tree or change the mentality of a person so they can help change the environment.
Born in 1944 in Aimorés, Minas Gerais, Brazil, the sixth child and only boy in a family of eight children, the son of a cattle rancher, Sebastião Ribeiro Salgado studied economics in Brazil (1964-1967) and earned his M.A. in economics in 1968 from the University of São Paulo and Vanderbilt University (USA). In 1971 he completed his coursework for his Ph.D. in economics at the University of Paris and worked as an economist for the International Coffee Organization until 1973.
After borrowing his wife Lélia's camera on a trip to Africa, in 1973 he decided to switch to photography and joined the Sygma photo agency (1974-75) followed by the Gamma agency (1975-1979). He then was elected to membership in the international cooperative, Magnum Photos, and remained with the organization from 1979-94. From his base in Paris he covered news events such as wars in Angola and the Spanish Sahara, the taking of Israeli hostages in Entebbe, the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan, and also started to pursue more personal and in-depth documentary projects.
For seven years (1977-1984) he roamed Latin America, his native region, walking to remote mountain villages to produce the images for his eventual book and exhibition Other Americas (1986), a meditative exploration of peasant cultures and the cultural resistance of Indians and their descendants in Mexico and Brazil. In the mid-1980s he worked for fifteen months with the French aid group Doctors Without Borders in the drought-stricken Sahel region of Africa and created Sahel: L'Homme en Détresse (Sahel: Man in Distress) (1986), a document on the dignity and endurance of people in their deepest suffering. From 1986 to 1992 he focused on Workers (1993), a documentary shot in 26 countries on the end of large-scale manual labor. After Terra: Struggle of the Landless (1997), a project on those fighting to reclaim their land in his native country of Brazil, Salgado published Migrations and The Children (2000) on the plight of displaced persons, refugees and migrants in 41 countries.
A world-renowned photographer and part of the tradition of "concerned photography," Sebastião Salgado has been awarded virtually every major photographic prize and award in recognition of his accomplishments from institutions around the world. In 1994 he founded his own press agency, Amazonas Images, which represents him and his work. He lives in Paris with his wife and collaborator Lélia Wanick Salgado, who has designed most of his books. They have two sons.