Art & the Shaping of Identity

“I hope that the person who visits my exhibitions, and the person who comes out, are not quite the same.”

-Sebastiao Salgado

Brazilian photojournalist Sebastiao Salgado is a Brazilian photojournalist who was born on a farm in the rural state of Minas Gerais in Brazil. His adventures of traveling from place to place began when his family moved to the small town of Aimores when he was five. Moving periodically throughout his youth, Salgado settled for a time in Sao Paulo where he studied to become an economist. In 1969, with Brazil under military rule, he and his wife, Lelia Wanick Salgado, left for Europe and became in his own words, “part refugees, part immigrants, part students.” [i]

Living in France as a political exile from Brazil, Salgado continued a career in economics and studied agricultural economics at the University of Paris. Significantly, working with the International Coffee Organization based in London brought him to Africa for the very first time. 2 Seeing the horrifying war, refugees, and hunger in Africa, Salgado began to photograph these events to show others what was truly going on. After showing some of his first images to members of the World Council of Churches, he was hired on spot to photograph the famine in Ethiopia. 3 Salgado then parted from ways with economics and embraced photography as his career.

He worked with the photo agencies Sygma, Gamma, and Magnum Photos until in 1994 he and his wife formed the agency Amazonas Images to be specifically for his type of work showing real world events.4 They show the hunger, the pain, and the unhappiness that people experience in different parts of the world. Salgado has traveled to 100 countries to photograph people and has presented them in more than ten books. His first publication titled Other Americas focuses mainly on the lives of the indigenous people of Latin America. The photograph “Scene near the Marubo Maronal Village, State of Amazonas, Brazil, 1998” was included in Other Americas.

Salgado is not just an artist though. He has always been concerned with social change, which is why he first studied economics, but after his trip to Africa he discovered that a better way to enact social change was through images. His photographs portray the human side of economic and social development. He is more of a documentary photographer, which is also known as a photojournalist.

In the image titled “Scene near the Marubo Maronal Village, State of Amazonas” a child is with his mother beside a shimmering stream deep in the rainforest. You can see that the people in the photograph are working with the land to gather necessities for themselves and the village.

The people in the picture are of the Marubo Indian tribe that inhabits the Javari River Valley of Brazil and Peru, and this tribe is the largest and most powerful within their area. The Marubo were the first of the Javari tribes to have contact with “outsiders.” They were also the first to have access to weapons such as shotguns, which further increased their dominance over the other tribes.5 In the image you can see that while the women are semi-clothed, one boy is naked, while another boy is wearing a t-shirt, shorts, and tennis shoes. This shows the change the tribe is going through and the way it is slowly westernizing and having more contact with the outside world. Although the tribe is becoming more westernized this image shows that the tribe is still in a good relationship with nature and the land. They are using the Earth’s resources to gather necessities for their village.

Using black and white photography, Salgado shows the shadows and light within the rainforest. With some of the shrubbery and the stream glistening with light, the rainforest looks damp but healthy with humidity lingering in the air. We may see the people as unhappy only because our lives are unlike theirs in many ways, but somehow with the light upon them in a certain way you can tell that they are living a happy an healthy life. Without the land though, there lives would be more hectic and unfavorable.

ND