The Constructed Documentary:
Sebastião Salgado’s Quest for Dignity
Ariel Goldberg
April 11th, 2001
“One has to find for man another kinship than that which ties him to being, one that will perhaps enable us to conceive of this difference between me and the other, this inequality in a sense absolutely opposed to oppression.” –Emanuel Levinas
When one first encounters Sebastião Salgado’s photograph, The children must be weighed and measured in order to adjust their rations. In a nutritional center, Mali, 1985, all seems well. A small boy is playing gleefully in a hanging scale as if swinging on a swing, his face upturned with the thrill of being suspended in the air. His small frame is enveloped by the scale’s straps, and he grabs onto them in order to hold himself steady. He seems to be the model of happiness, except upon closer inspection we notice that his physical condition is horrifying. Where one might mistake him for being skinny, we see that he is in fact woefully emaciated—his chest is nothing more than a ribcage, his thighs are no bigger than his arms, and his joints appear large and knobby in comparison to his wasted limbs. His weight, if one can attribute any to him, registers a mere quarter of a turn on the scale’s face. It is here in a decrepit nutritional center that could for all intents and purposes be a barn that Salgado presents to us the paradox that is Mali: it has been and is still suffering from devastating famine and yet against all odds, life carries on. The boy bears the marks of his terrible hunger, and yet he is still a child with all the dignity and playfulness that accompanies youth. It is this dichotomy, of suffering and life, neither one quite dominating the other, that Salgado brings to his documentary photography.
In her article Who is Speaking Thus?, Abigail Solomon-Godeau critiques the traditional concepts that surround documentary photography. She criticizes the air of objectivity that surrounds it, and examines how the very nature of photography lends it a certain authority that most people take for granted, especially when viewing documentaries. She says,
“A photograph appears to be self generated—as though it had created itself. We know the photographer had to have been on the scene—indeed, this serves as a further guarantee of the image’s truth—but the photographer is manifestly absent from the field of the image… Phenomenologically, the photograph registers as pure image, and it is by virtue of this effect that we commonly ascribe to photography the mythic value of transparency.”[1]
These factors, added to our notions of the authority of a documentary lead us to believe these works are utterly objective, when in fact they can be viewed as being nothing more than perfectly subjective imagery. Salgado, on the other hand, breaks with the tradition of maintaining the façade of objectivity in his documentary work. Nowhere in his work and at no time does one feel he is attempting to provide an objective, disinterested view of these crises. Through his overt use of artistic sensibilities—beautiful composition, meaningful poses and extraordinary settings—and his creation of a sort of magical realism, the photographs never are registered as pure image, and never are mistaken for being transparent. Salgado’s photos are too beautiful to have been taken from anything but a frame from a movie and this perfection makes them extremely striking. At the same time, they contain enough humanity so that we can never forget that they are so very real.
So what does this do, this rendering opaque of the medium of visual representation? It has a very significant effect on the role the photographs play in documenting world suffering. For one thing, the photographer effectively never steps of out the “field of the image” and so we are always aware of his touch. This persistent presence is exactly what Salgado wants because he never wants us to think that the photos are disinterested, objective documentation. Quite on the contrary, these photographs are for something. They have been taken in order to raise the viewer’s consciousness about the situation and to get him or her to do something. As David Levi Strauss pointed out, “Salgado’s devotion to the people he photographs often transforms them into images of the sacred.”[2] These photos are not impersonal—we see Salgado’s devotion to the people and that is carried very strongly in the image and into our interpretation of it.
Salgado’s work in documenting the plight of many third world countries is very different from a lot of traditional documentary photography. One of the most significant ways that he differs from other photographers is that every photo he takes is steeped with a strong esthetic sense even though what he is depicting is not the usual subject matter for such artistry. Most photos of this kind shy away from estheticizing scenes such as these with the belief that it objectifies the other and their suffering should not be made art.[3] On the contrary, Salgado embraces this as his tool for evoking emotion within us, even though in an autobiographical sketch he once said, “What I want in my pictures is not that they'll look like art objects. They are journalist pictures. All my pictures. No exceptions.”[4]
Salgado’s photos aren’t the typical depictions of famine that poster bony children and gaunt faces as the symbol of suffering. As Fred Ritchin so aptly perceived, “Such a ploy serves to tug momentarily at us in the affluent North until we succumb to ‘compassion fatigue’ and go on to the next grouping of two-dimensional figures to be temporarily featured.”[5] Salgado does not seek to make us compassionate to the plight of his subjects through terrorizing us with horrifying images that make people act through pity or guilt. Instead his images are beautiful and captivating, and given this chance to be human, Salgado’s subjects become individuals, setting them apart as something beautiful and special. This helps humanize the situation because it allows the viewer to identify with the scene rather than alienating. In The children must be weighed and measured…, we see the careful considerations of form and weight -- the straps of the scale form a beautiful symmetrical diamond shape that the boy’s form intersects. His body seems poured into the harness, and his arms and legs flow from the straps, hardly any thicker or more substantial than they. His large gleeful head anchors the photo, directing the viewer’s gaze upwards to the round faceplate which echoes the boy’s circular
In addition to the overt beauty of his photographs, Salgado forces us to connect with the images by withholding a title. The lack of a simple title prevents us from associating the image and reducing it to a mere one line description, exemplary of that name, and then throwing it away as “understood.” In an a priori, stereotypical fashion, it seems that one can understand “Famine” or “A refugee family at rest” without ever needing to see an actual photograph. One can understand it intellectually, but Salgado wants the viewers to understand the image on a personal, emotional level. In his books he does not include any captions or titles near the images; one must look up the captions at the back of the book. As Roland Barthes noted, “all images are polysemous; they imply, underlying their signifiers, a ‘floating chain’ of signifieds, the reader able to choose some and ignore others.”[6] Without any immediate linguistic component to guide (blind) us, we must thoroughly examine the photograph in order to understand it. The lack of a title forces one to enter the image and begin to identify with its subjects in order to begin to sense the situation and its significance. Once the viewer has done this, he may look up the captions which to a large degree allow the images to stand on their own. Rather than summarizing the image, the captions provide factual background information, contextualizing the scene in the larger framework of the area’s socioeconomic status.
Over the course of several decades, Sebastião Salgado has worked to raise the world’s consciousness of the plight of many third world countries. He has acted to bring people from the level of mere statistics to the level of the sacred through the medium of photography. His photography is very much indeed documentary—he is cataloguing and systematically recording the fate of these populations—yet he breaks from traditional notions of objectivity and indifference for the very simple reason that he believes that documentary photography must be purposeful and must effect change. He accomplishes this change through the artistic representation of people as people, bridging the gap of geography and class. Following the path set out by Levinas, Salgado’s photographs enable us to view the world’s poor not as an estranged abstract phenomenon, but as kinsmen of the highest degree.
Bibliography
Barthes, Roland. “Rhetoric of the Image,” Classic Essays on Photography edited by Alan Trachtenberg. New Haven: Leet’s Island Books, 1980.
Levi Strauss, David. “Epiphany of the Other,” Artforum International. 29, Feb. 1991.
Fred Ritchin, “The Lyric Documentarian,” published in An Uncertain Grace. New York: Aperture Foundation, Inc., 1990.
Salgado, Sebastião. Quoted in “Bio”, April 4, 2001.
Solomon-Godeau, Abigail. Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.
[1] Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 180.
[2] David Levi Strauss, “Epiphany of the Other,” Artforum International 29, (Feb. 1991): 98.
[3] Levi Strauss, “Epiphany of the Other,” 98.
[4]Sebastião Salgado quoted in “Bio”, < > (April 4, 2001)
[5] Fred Ritchin, “The Lyric Documentarian,” published in An Uncertain Grace (New York: Aperture Foundation, Inc., 1990), 147.
[6] Roland Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image” published in Classic Essays on Photography (New Haven: Leet’s Island Books, 1980), 274.