tara, the hundred-and-twenty-foot ice-breaking yacht that ... · tara, the hundred-and-twenty-foot...

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Tara, the hundred-and-twenty-foot ice-breaking yacht that Salgado and the author sailed on from Ushuaia, the southernmost town in

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The Amazonas photographic agencyis in a neighborhood of rising ele-

gance and property prices in northeast-ern Paris, in a former coal warehouse onthe Saint-Martin canal. Just in front ofthe building, a steeply arched wrought-iron footbridge extends over the water tothe Hôtel du Nord,where Marcel Carnéset his melancholy film of the samename. Inside the agency, which featuresfloors of polished hardwood that wereimported from Brazil, half a millionpostcard-size work prints are immacu-lately arranged in smooth-running draw-ers. Six people work here, including twofull-time photographic printers, eachwith his own darkroom.

Sebastião Salgado, the Brazilian-born photojournalist known for beau-tiful black-and-white photographs ofpeople living difficult lives, is the agency’sonly photographer. In the world of pho-tojournalism,a place where his fame andmagisterial rhythm of work give him asingular status, Salgado has the addeddistinction of being his own producer:he owns the factory. And although Sal-gado often works abroad, when he doesreturn to his family in Paris he walkseach day to Amazonas, from an apart-ment fifteen minutes away.

One morning a few weeks ago, Sal-gado was in the basement of the office,where the sound of continuously runningwater—prints were being rinsed nearby—gave the room the feel of compulsorycalm found in the lobbies of some expen-sive hotels. On a wall in front of him wasa poster-size reproduction of a photo-graph he had taken in Serra Pelada, aBrazilian gold mine, in 1986. It showedthousands of men—sacrificial and single-minded,each apparently working for him-self—covering every surface of a greatopen pit, hauling dirt-filled sacks onmakeshift ladders.A silvery sheen of mudcovers the men,making it nearly impossi-ble to tell that they are wearing modernclothes. A contemporary image saturatedin the long history of South Americangold prospecting and in a longer history of human toil, it comes from a series ofextraordinary photographs taken at thesame mine which have been described as“evocative of the masterworks of PieterBrueghel and Cecil B. De Mille.” Fusingfact to myth, past to present, the imageshelped propel Salgado’s already successfulcareer to something far loftier, much the

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2005 143

Argentina, to the Antarctic Peninsula, in January, 2005. Photographs by Sebastião Salgado.

PROFILES

A COLD LIGHT

How Sebastião Salgado captures the world.

BY IAN PARKER

way Bono is something more than a popstar.Salgado, a former economist,has be-come an architect of photojournalisticprojects with a global reach,an icon of so-cial conscience, a kind of solo branch ofthe United Nations.

A broad-shouldered,Picasso-ish manof sixty-one, he was wearing jeans and a V-necked cashmere sweater over achecked shirt. He had a penknife in aleather pouch fixed to his belt, and gold-rimmed half-moon reading glasses on achain around his neck.His head is shavedbald, and his face is unlined; you cantherefore find your gaze skidding off him,or snagging on his bushy eyebrows,whichrise and fall in the beseeching way of aconductor squeezing sad and delicatesounds out of an orchestra.Lélia WanickSalgado, his wife of more than thirtyyears, the editor of his books and his ex-hibitions, and the director of Amazonas,was consulting with Salgado about a fu-ture retrospective in Paris. She is a slimwoman with a smoker’s dark-texturedvoice; she was dressed all in black, and at one point in the conversation her hus-band spun her slowly around, pickingpieces of lint from her clothes; when hewas done, she kissed him on the lips.

Lélia went to the office space upstairs,where Sebastião’s photographs are sold tomagazines,and where they are collected invast books and travelling exhibitions, and

where the phone calls are about honorarydegrees and invitations to sit on panels andaccept awards. (“We have two talents andthey are complementary,” she later said.“He knows how to take photographs andI know how to exploit them.”) Down-stairs, Salgado sat at a table with a long-time colleague, Françoise Piffard. Theyhad boxes of small, freshly printed pho-tographs in front of them—images fromhis latest long-term, self-assigned proj-ect,“Genesis.”For the first time,Salgadois photographing wild animals instead of people, in an enterprise that carries atleast a hint of the idea that he is owed avacation.He is visiting environments un-changed by human progress, after morethan thirty years spent photographingmiserably changing environments, andpeople in the middle of economic or po-litical upheaval. Salgado started “Gene-sis” last year, photographing giant tor-toises in the Galápagos Islands, gorillasin central Africa, whales off the Argen-tine coast. He expects to finish in 2012.

Salgado had just returned from Ant-arctica, and before him were dozens ofsmall photographs of penguins feedingtheir offspring by regurgitation, jammingtheir beaks down into the throats of theiryoung; there were also glaciers, and ice-bergs,and albatrosses looking directly intothe camera. “Nice, nice pictures. Incredi-ble dignity they had,”Salgado said of the

birds.His first language is Portuguese,andhe speaks both French and English withan accent that becomes stronger if he getsagitated or excited; in English,“refugees”becomes “hefugees,” for example.

The work prints needed to be dividedinto two piles: yes and no. Such siftingwould eventually lead to a final selection ofabout fifty images, which would be pre-sented to magazines.In an action repeatedevery minute or so, Salgado held up twophotographs with a similar composition,often taken moments apart, and he andPiffard would try to find a weaker printto reject, with Salgado saying, “I wish thesky was a bit more dramatic,” or, “I don’tthink that’s too horrible,” or enthusing,“That’s beautiful, no? That is the idea,how close we can be to Genesis,yet in ourtimes!” Piffard wore magnifying goggles,and peered forward with pursed lips, like ajeweller; at times she questioned a com-position,or simply said,“I don’t think so.”Salgado decided on rejects only grudg-ingly,slapping them down like a frustratedpoker player. When he put neither printinto the reject pile (which was growingmore slowly than the other), Piffard said,“Oh, Sebastião,” disapprovingly.

“I’m happy,”Salgado said.He rubbedhis hand over his smooth scalp.“I believewe have a story.” In the room next door,the printers were making more penguins,and more albatrosses. Salgado had re-turned from Antarctica with more thanten thousand negatives.

Afew weeks earlier,I had watched Sal-gado unpack his bags in a cabin on

a hundred-and-twenty-foot ice-breakingyacht moored in the harbor of Ushuaia,the southernmost town in Argentina. Atmid-evening,the air was cool,but summersunshine still entered the room through a skylight. “All this is a question of adap-tation,” Salgado said, as he arranged hispossessions in the small space.“You adaptyourself to any kind of place you find.”Hehad four identical medium-format cam-eras, each the size of a brick, and severalhundred rolls of black-and-white film,which he lined up on the higher of thetwo bunk beds as neatly as in a store dis-play. He showed me two pairs of khakipants into which Lélia had sewn Velcrostrips at the knee, on the inside, for at-taching little pads that made kneeling onthe ground more comfortable; some newsnow-proof boots; and tiny elasticized

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144 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2005

“Let’s go someplace awful to avoid the tourists.”

• •

rain protectors for his cameras’ viewfind-ers which he had made out of showercaps. He had a ball of wool for darninghis sweater, anti-inflammatory drugs for a damaged tendon,Quaker Oats, andPortuguese translations of books by Bruce Chatwin and John Kenneth Gal-braith.“And here are fingerless gloves,”hesaid. “In reality, they are not fingerless.You go like this, now out.” He foldeddown a flap, and his fingerless gloves be-came mittens. “To change the films, youput here again, that’s it. That is this.” Herefolded the flap, then went back andforth: glove, mitten.

The ship was due to sail around CapeHorn, and then south to the Chilean is-lands of Diego Ramírez, and then thetwo hundred and fifty or so miles of opensea to the Antarctic Peninsula, an arm onthe continent which stretches north to-ward South America. Salgado would beat sea for six weeks,and I was joining himfor part of his trip.The ship was strikinglyhandsome from the outside—with an un-painted hull of reinforced aluminum thathad the broad, shallow proportions of asurfboard—but its interior was not luxu-rious. It felt like an overcrowded beachhouse whose décor had been neglectedsince the mid-nineteen-eighties: the fit-tings were nondescript pale wood,and thebench seats had worn,blue foam cushions.The walls were decorated with framedimages of Endurance, the ship captainedby the British Antarctic explorer ErnestShackleton; Endurance was trapped byice in 1915, and then destroyed by it.

There were eight small cabins, eachwith two narrow bunk beds. The boat’sowner, Étienne Bourgois, was housedclose to Salgado. Bourgois, an amiable,troubled-looking man of forty-four, is thedirector of Agnès B., the French fashioncompany founded by his mother, Agnès.Divorced and the father of five,Bourgoishas the face of a young man but the tuftybaldness of a sixty-year-old,giving the im-pression of a high-school student playingKing Lear. Bourgois bought the ship in2003 from the estate of Sir Peter Blake,the New Zealand sailing hero and Amer-ica’s Cup winner. In 2001, Blake sailed the ship—then called the Seamaster—tothe Amazon.Near the mouth of the river,armed pirates forced their way on board.Blake was standing at the bottom of thestairs that connect the living quarters to thedeck when he opened fire on them with a

shotgun that he kept on board. He shottwo fingers off a pirate’s hand,but the gunjammed;Blake was shot and killed.Leadfrom Blake’s cartridge was still embed-ded in a window at the top of the stairs.

In the last years of his life,Blake was agood-will ambassador for the United Na-tions Environment Program,UNEP.AfterBourgois bought the Seamaster—and re-named it Tara, his family’s traditionalname for its boats—he arranged to con-tinue the association with UNEP.UNEP of-ficials also happened to be in conversationwith Salgado,and knew of his plans to in-clude Antarctica among the twenty or sostories that would make up the “Genesis”project. Bourgois offered Salgado a ride.For all the obvious appeal of a privateyacht exploring the continent on its owntimetable, Salgado hesitated. Bourgois’sidea was a shared expedition for poets,painters, and photographers. “I said no,”Salgado told me. “I said, I apologize,I cannot accept to go and look at thingstogether, one make pictures, anotherwrite—a kind of tourism. I must go towork.” (Salgado has been to every countryin the world, he says, except New Zea-land,Nicaragua,and Tonga,and has neverbought himself a souvenir.) Bourgois andSalgado agreed on a separate trip; the art-ists would have their adventure anothertime. His agency put up about twentythousand dollars, a quarter of the cost.

Tara had sixteen people on board,most of them Bourgois’s compatriots.There was a paid crew of five, includ-ing the ship’s captain—a woman in herthirties—and a young female chef andher boyfriend, a sailor who had recentlybought a trumpet but had only learnedto play the opening notes of “La Vie en Rose.” Tara was also carrying Bour-gois’s cousin and business partner, as wellas a wiry alpine climbing guide with aG.P.S.-equipped wristwatch; an officialTara photographer; three experiencedFrench sailors; and two men from aFrench nature television show,who were

doing research for a possible Antarcticadocumentary. (Salgado was wary.“TV isheavy,”he said.“People are always so im-pressed. ‘Oh, it’s television.’ ”)

Tara was delayed in Ushuaia for a day.The crew and guests ate lunch and drankwine together squeezed around a table in the main living area.Salgado, the old-est at the table, was friendly, but in arather formal, fastidious way; a man-ner that was mirrored in the care withwhich he used his penknife (rather thanthe available silverware) to cut up fruit.Asked about his priorities in Antarctica,he said, “I want everything—the ani-mals, the landscapes. I want the planet.”After lunch, when the table becamecluttered with the digital cameras andlaptop computers of his shipmates (Sal-gado had neither), he walked into townto buy some Ziploc bags. Sunlight waspeeping through gray Scottish skies.“Look at this light,oh boy,”he said, add-ing, with a black-and-white photogra-pher’s satisfaction, “In color, this is shit.”

“Genesis” is mainly funded by Ama-zonas’deals with magazines and newspa-pers,among them,Paris Match, in France;the Guardian, in Britain; Rolling Stone,in the United States; and Visão, in Portu-gal. (This leaves a financial shortfall that is made up by grants, including three hun-dred thousand dollars from the Chris-tensen Fund,and by the occasional adver-tising job—Illy coffee, for example—forwhich Salgado asks around thirty thou-sand dollars a day.) Eventually, there islikely to be a “Genesis” book and exhibi-tion. “I’m having the opportunity of mylife to be in the most beautiful places inthe planet!” he said.“And probably doingmy last story in photography. I’ll finishwhen I’m seventy years old. Not that I’llstop photography, but I’m not sure if I’llhave strength enough to do another long-term project.”

His two previous projects on a similarscale, “Workers” and “Migrations,” eachtook more than five years. The latter, astudy of people displaced by war and by aglobalized world economy,was punishingto produce, physically and mentally, andleft Salgado unsure if mankind deservedto survive. The “Genesis” project had itsroots in that period of despair, Salgadosaid. But he is a former Marxist activistand a onetime student of Esperanto, andalthough he has lost the big mustache ofhis youth,he has a surviving confidence in

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Two Kosovar women, among the tens of thousands of refugees who left their homes to flee the conflict with the Serbs, on the road

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between Kukës and the Morini border post, in Albania, in 1999.

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the possibility of prompting radical ac-tion.“Genesis”was in part inspired by theInstituto Terra,a nonprofit environmentalfoundation that Lélia and Sebastião runon seventeen hundred acres of formerfarmland in the rain forest of southeastBrazil. (The Salgados have a home bythe sea, a few hours away.) The Salga-dos have planted seven hundred and fortythousand trees on the site so far, with theaim of planting a million and a half trees.The land is returning to its prelapsarianstate; schoolchildren are being broughtto see it. “This gave me a big hope that we can live with nature, be in peace withour planet,”Salgado said.“Genesis,” then,could set a similar example.Salgado,whotalks of his photography only as a tool—an action undertaken in the world ofinformation, not the world of art—hadmanaged to balance gloom with a senseof purpose. “Forty-six per cent of theplanet is not destroyed,” he said. “I mustshow this, take pictures that show it’s nec-essary to preserve these places.Show howwide they are, how big they are.”

Tara motored out of Ushuaia. Later,the sails were raised. Salgado made

himself weatherproof and took a “king ofthe world” spot on the bow. When dol-phins swam alongside, and his shipmatesdashed from side to side to photographthem (and while Bourgois leaned overthe railing and slapped Tara’s hull, in whatI took to be a known form of human-to-dolphin communication),Salgado re-mained still, and waited for a dolphin topass in front of his camera. RoundingCape Horn the following day, we tookphotographs of one another;Salgado didnot look in anyone’s lens, but insteadgazed down into the water,with the air ofmodest contemplation seen on the face ofa Virgin Mary in a Renaissance painting.

We sailed south and lost sight of SouthAmerica. The air became colder and thesea rougher.Most of those on board spentthe afternoon queasily in bed—includingSalgado, who listened to his new iPod,which, as he later showed me, includedChopin’s Nocturne No.2 and a Julio Igle-sias song in its Most Played list.

That night, Tara reached Diego Ra-mírez, a group of small islands sixtymiles southwest of Cape Horn, unin-habited but for a lonely meteorologicalstation on one of them. Salgado had of-ficial permission to land, a rare entitle-

ment owing something to the ship’s U.N.imprimatur—and to the fact that Sal-gado himself is a good-will ambassadorfor UNICEF. After the ship spent a nightat anchor, he went ashore by inflatablemotorboat with five others.“What a priv-ilege to be here!”Salgado said,after land-ing awkwardly on a small rocky beach atthe foot of some grassy cliffs. He putdown his stuff. Photojournalists do notusually travel with assistants, and Sal-gado, who would never want to be takenout of that category, tends to travel alone,even after having made the switch, for“Genesis,” from 35-mm.Leicas to heav-ier,medium-format Pentax cameras.But

he accepts help, and allowed volunteers to carry some of his equipment. Sal-gado kept a camera over each shoulder.

It was cold and the sky was a flat gray.We began to climb the slope,pulling our-selves up by tufts of silvery-green grassfour or five feet high. Within moments,Salgado found himself standing before a gray-headed albatross—smooth andpolished,with smears of black around itseyes. At a distance of about six feet, Sal-gado raised a camera: the shutter made a surprisingly loud clunk. He movedcloser, and quietly sang a classic bossa-nova song, “A Felicidade.”

“Where’s my tripod?” he asked. “Theperson who’s carrying my stuff needs to benear me.” (His avuncular manner tight-ened into something harder when hebegan photographing; by the end of theday, he was holding a hand out behindhim,without turning around,to show thathe needed his tripod.) The others in thegroup had already taken their own pic-tures of the bird and moved on, and hadfound another albatross,and then another.

FOUR POEMS OF YOUTH

1. the dream

Laterthat now long-lost nightin December, beside you, I sawthat the leaves had returnedto the branchesoutside my window. Nowthat is all it was: leaves, blowing in the windy sunlight: somehow,in spite of the chances against itoccurring, in spite of the critic’s wan sneer,I dreamed this lovely thing.

2. minneapolis, 1960

Children in a classroom peerinto microscopes.Bombsightsit occursto the young womanmoving from oneto another, peripherally mesmerizedby the second hand, treesflailingdimly in windows.

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The slope was covered in birds,which hadrarely, if ever,seen humans and had no rea-son to fear them;they barely moved whenapproached, beyond turning their headsthis way and that, like fashion models. Itwas hard to think of another environmentas congenial to the novice wildlife pho-tographer. (As Art Wolfe, one of Amer-ica’s leading photographers of wildlife,later explained, without scoffing, it is eas-ier if the animals are not running away.)

Salgado, unhurried by the activityabove him,retrieved his tripod while keep-ing his eye on the first albatross as if it werethe last bird on earth. He changed filmwith the deliberation of a mime artist.Each time he took out an exposed film,hehad to lick a paper tag to seal it closed,andfor this he used a big, slow lick that hintedat the perils of rushed licking.Then,as hewound in the new film, he sang moreloudly than before.“It’s the only way I getto hold my concentration,” he later toldme.“When you change the film,you breakyour sequence.Changing film is an emptymoment and you fill it with the music.”

Once, years ago, Salgado flew toRome to take a portrait of the novel-ist Italo Calvino. “I can only give you anhour,” Calvino said upon opening thedoor. Salgado said he needed at least two or three days. (He got them.) Afterforty-five minutes on the island,Salgadowas still just a few feet above the beach.The day was arranging itself accordingto two different appreciations of timeand space: it was the unspoken instinctof everyone but Salgado to reach the topof the slope quickly, then make a sur-vey—to take possession of the pristineisland.Salgado’s instinct was to look onlyat the thing in front of him. “Almost noone in the world has seen this,” he said.His left hand, cupped under the lens,made minute movements to focus.

When he finally reached the top ofthe slope, he found hundreds of alba-trosses of a different species, sitting onmud nests the size and shape of a dog’sfeeding bowl. Salgado inched amongthem,as infant albatrosses spilled orangevomit onto his new boots. When the

sun came out, he shot into the light, ashas always been his preference. (“For me,the good pictures are against the light.Against the light, you have shapes, theforms get a contour. It’s not easy but Ilike it.”) He said that he wanted to show“the equilibrium of the birds and theirenvironment.” Beyond Salgado’s hear-ing, one of the party said, in a friendlyenough way, “If it’s like this everyplace,we’ll be on the island for three months.”

Salgado’s reputation was built on mon-umental, backlit images of physical

labor and human fortitude, and to watchhim work—to wake up for two weeks to the soft buzzing of Salgado shaving his head smooth in the cabin opposite—was to be shown how a shadow of self-portraiture falls across those images. Sal-gado would not mistake himself for asteelworker or an underfed migrant, butwhat has interested him in others is whathe looks for in himself: a level of imper-viousness to testing conditions,and toler-ance of a long working day. For Salgado,taking pictures is a pleasure but also a dis-cipline: he is not the kind of photogra-pher who goes to pick up laundry carry-ing a loaded camera. When I spoke toRobert Pledge,Salgado’s friend and agentin the U.S.,he could not remember a sin-gle occasion in thirty years when Salgadohad taken his photograph. (Salgado saidthat he remembered one.)

At the end of a cold, ten-hour stay on the island at Diego Ramírez,Salgadowas able to show no less interest in theday’s last albatross than he had shown inthe first—holding his thumb and fore-finger together in a gesture of epicureansatisfaction while his shipmates slumpedon the springy earth, fully gorged onbirds and sea lions.“I have a few good pic-tures,”Salgado said.“I don’t think I havea great picture. The sky was fifty-per-cent sky,not a hundred-per-cent sky.Allmy life was like that—looking and wait-ing for the combination.”

For three days after leaving Diego Ra-mírez, Tara sailed across the Drake Pas-sage,beyond sight of land.Salgado had toendure a period of enforced inactivity.Theweather was stormy, and the front of theship rose up and then came banging downwith the sound of someone dropping asmall car onto the deck. Seawater washedover the skylights. In the living area, bluerubber matting was brought out to stop

3. on the run

Winter hours, whitedune grass.Secretpinewoods to the ocean—now what?

4. the blackout: first anniversary

It finds me in Port Authority, penniless,seated at a bar unable to rememberhow I came there (why is obvious).Do you know this terror—not to remember? I go to the men’s room and look in the mirror,look in his aggrieved and music-haunted eyes.The mouth opens, but there are no words;there are words, but the mouth will not open.Tears form but cannot fall, fingersgradually tightening at my throat . . .Blood of his blood, flesh of his ghost—the hand stretched toward me in the flames!Do you?I am worn out, I can’t go on.

—Franz Wright

the plates from sliding off the table. Itbegan to snow. Salgado, restless at times,made slow tours of the main cabin, tryingto stay upright while reading and rereadingthe dishwashing roster and the warningson packets of seasickness pills.

Salgado is not an ebullient man:his so-ciability sometimes seems to come from aportfolio of skills learned with the aim oftaking fine photographs; he often allowshis sentences to fade away, with a sigh—“And this is that . . .” But when he talksabout the Instituto Terra, to which he and his wife have given much of theirtime and income in recent years,he grows animated. As we thumped through thewaves, he told me how fish and birds had reappeared at the site; how his friendRobin Williams (with whom he spentElection Night last year in L.A.) had putthirty thousand dollars into a theatre at theinstitute; how the institute had becomeone of the town’s largest employers. Oneevening,he drew a little map of the land inmy notebook. “The pumas are back!” hesaid.“You know, one puma tells another.”

The Instituto’s seventeen hundredacres had previously belonged to Salgado’sfather, a freemason and local assemblymember who was so formal that his chil-dren called him Senhor. Salgado grew upa few minutes from the ranch, in the townof Aimorés, in a house with seven sisters.His mother was a dressmaker.During hischildhood, Salgado watched as his fam-ily’s land, once forest, turned to dust, as his father brought more and more cattle

onto it.When Sebastião and Lélia boughtthe acreage from the family, in 1991,“theland was dead,” Salgado said. Learning of their idea of turning the soil back overto trees, Salgado’s father told them thatthey were crazy. (He died in 2001; Sal-gado’s mother died the following year.)

“I am from the most baroque place onthe planet,” Salgado said to me. His fam-ily was not particularly religious, and hegrew up to be a nonbeliever, but Salgadosang (in Latin) in the choir of his Cath-olic, Salesian high school, and was sur-rounded by the kind of religious architec-ture and iconography that are embeddedin his work:Sudanese refugees illuminatedby heavenly shafts of light; a gold minerleaning on a post in the pose of a mar-tyred saint.To these childhood influencesSalgado then added a leftist sensibility,formed at a moment of repression and re-bellion in Brazilian history. He studiedeconomics first in Vitória, the nearestlarge city to Aimorés,where he met Lélia,in 1964 (“Oh,she was beautiful: thin, largebreasts, hallelujah!” I heard him say onetime, turning his eyes upward), and thenin São Paulo.For a short while afterward,he worked as an economist in the Min-istry of Finance for São Paulo state. (AsSalgado pointed out,he had experience inplanning and financing large-scale proj-ects long before the organizational feat of“Workers.”) By 1968, the military gov-ernment that had come to power in acoup four years earlier was evolving into afull-blown dictatorship, and the Salga-

dos became part of a protest movement.The couple gave money to the A.L.N.(Ação Libertadora Nacional), the armedgroup led by Carlos Marighella, who isnow best known as the author of the“Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla,” aguide to terrorist techniques that influ-enced the tactics of the Baader-Meinhofgroup and the I.R.A. At this time, Sal-gado was a Communist, and a supporterof the Cuban revolution;he was never anA.L.N. member, but he did meet Ma-righella. (Salgado later regretted havingtold me about his A.L.N.connection,notfor fear of seeming extreme but out ofanxiety that he would appear to be dress-ing himself in radical chic.)

The authorities made no move againstSebastião and Lélia, but friends were ar-rested, and some of them were tortured.“We could either leave or become clan-destine,” Salgado said, and in 1968 thecouple moved to Paris, where Sebastiãostudied for a Ph.D. in economics at theSorbonne.Photographs taken at the timeshow him bearded, long-haired, and in-tense, looking much like the young BjornBorg. The Salgados remained politicallyactive. Later, their Brazilian passportswere revoked, and Salgado did not returnto that country until 1979. “It was toughfor my father,”Salgado said.“When I leftBrazil, he was a strong man. When Icame back, he was an old man.”

Lélia began a course in architecture,and in 1970 she bought a Pentax camera,to use in her studies. When Salgado firstpicked the camera up, that summer, hehad never taken a photograph before. Inhis first, taken while on vacation in thesoutheast of France, Lélia is seen sittingon a window with the light behind her.“I knew when I looked inside this camera,now I had another way to relate with anykind of thing,”Salgado told me.“It was sonatural.” After finishing his Ph.D. coursework but before writing his thesis,Salgadoaccepted a well-paid job in London withthe International Coffee Organization—coffee’s OPEC—and began to work on adiversification fund designed to raise cof-fee prices by encouraging growers to moveinto other crops. He took Lélia’s cameraon field trips to Africa.“He was not satis-fied with economics,” Lélia remembered.“But he was very happy to take pictures.”

Sebastião set up a darkroom in theirapartment. “At first, it was just fun,”Lélia recalled.One summer afternoon in

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“Found meat is income.”

1972, he and Lélia rented a rowing boatin Hyde Park and went out on the Ser-pentine to discuss their future.“I’d studiedmany years and I had a very good job—hard to get this job—and I had an invi-tation to go to the World Bank in Wash-ington,” Salgado said. But he wanted to be a photographer. Lélia agreed heshould try, despite the financial risks.When Salgado resigned from the I.C.O.,soon after,his boss was exasperated by hisapparent naïveté. “Of course you want to be a photographer,”he said.“I want to be a photographer. My wife wants to bea photographer.”

The Salgados moved back to Paris,and Salgado began to find work withtrade-union and church magazines: heshot stories about migrant workers andthe construction of the Pompidou Center.But, as Robert Pledge recently recalled,“he was lucky that Portuguese-speakingcountries were very much in the news.That propelled him onto the circuit.”Sal-gado was quickly taken on by the Sygmaagency, and covered Portugal’s CarnationRevolution, in 1974, and Angola’s war ofindependence, which led to Portugal’swithdrawal from the country, in 1975.And he did the everyday news stories and golf tournaments of an agency pho-tographer. Pledge, who was then at theGamma agency, which Salgado joined in1975, could already detect Salgado’s rest-lessness.“He quickly said, ‘I don’t want todo this all my life.’ He was talking aboutnot dealing with the news per se but usingthe news to deal with issues—poverty, in-justice. That really struck me. That’s notwhat young photographers said then.”

Sebastião and Lélia’s first son, Juli-ano, was born in 1974. Rodrigo, their sec-ond, was born in 1979. He had Downsyndrome, a fact that his parents had notknown during the pregnancy.Salgado toldme that he cried for three hours after Ro-drigo was born. The baby suffered fromrespiratory problems, and Lélia alwayskept him in her arms as he slept. “Shethought he was going to die,”Salgado toldme. (Today, Rodrigo lives with his par-ents.) By now, Salgado was frequentlyworking overseas; in 1979,he joined Mag-num, the élite and coöperatively ownedphoto agency founded in 1947 by RobertCapa, with Henri Cartier-Bresson andothers. Lélia told me, “It was hard. Hethought I was strong,and could do it.AndI could do it, but it was a lot—the house,

the children, illness, all that.” She neverasked him to stop, and he never thoughtof changing the pace or the emphasis ofhis work, in order to spend more time inParis. ( Juliano Salgado, who now worksin television and movies, and himself hasa son, told me that he thought of his father as an “Indiana Jones figure.”) In1981, Salgado was on his way back fromAustralia when he accepted an assign-ment from the Times to spend three daysphotographing Ronald Reagan. Whenthe President was shot,outside the Wash-ington Hilton, Salgado was a few feetfrom the scene.Sales of Salgado’s photo-graphs from that day (he took seventy-sixframes, with three cameras, in about aminute) made enough money for him tobuy the apartment in Paris where he andLélia still live, and, in an uncharacter-istically flashy gesture, an Alfa RomeoAlfetta—“an incredibly nice car.”

Late one evening,Tara’s captain calledus up to the bridge to see a single

green dot on the radar: the first iceberg.And when we woke the next morningthe ship was passing through a calm,wide channel with white mountains oneither side. There was a hint of some-thing sour and eggy in the air that welearned to recognize as the smell ofmassed penguins. Out of the wind, itbarely felt colder than a December day inCentral Park; and among the serioussailors there began a silent competition

to see who could respond to Antarc-tica with the most non-specialist ward-robe, at least for a few minutes at a time:T-shirts, baggy cardigans, plaid slippers.

We were near the northern tip of theseven-hundred-mile-long Antarctic Pen-insula,on the western side: a landscape offjords and islands.This strand of Antarc-tica is relatively close to South America,and, because it is less cold than the massof the continent, a dozen or so scientificbases have been built by various countries,at the kind of rocky coastal spots also val-ued by penguins. These few sheds andhuts, along with some grander develop-ments, on the other side of Antarctica,and a station at the South Pole, constitutevirtually the only man-made environ-ment, and therefore human population,of the continent, which is one and a halftimes the size of the United States. Wedropped anchor close to the Chilean baseof Gonzalez Videla. Salgado went onshore dressed in many layers of clothingand walked up a little icy slope, where heput on sunglasses, and said quietly, “Idon’t know if I can do this. It’s too big.”He was looking across at a panorama ofsea and icebergs.Glaciers slipped straightinto the sea, forming ice cliffs where theycame to an end in the water. It looked asif a flood had rolled into a Himalayan val-ley. “I ask myself if it’s possible to repre-sent it by pictures,” he said.

Salgado moved hesitantly off the iceonto dark rocks—you could feel your

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“Maybe we mate for life because we’re lazy.”

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Salgado’s 1986 image of workers in the open pit of a mine at Serra Pelada, Brazil, a remote site in the Amazon where gold had

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been discovered a few years earlier. More than fifty thousand prospectors were at work in Serra Pelada.

pupils snap into dilation—and wanderedamong a colony of gentoo penguins. Itwas a world of bleakly reduced diversity:a penguin factory with few plants or in-sects. Dozens of penguins crouched onnests made of piled pebbles; above, a fewpredatory skuas circled, looking for un-guarded penguin eggs or chicks. Nowand then, a penguin would throw backits head and screech, sending a puff ofcondensation into the air.

Salgado makes frequent use of theword “dignity,” and he gives it four sylla-bles in English:dig-in-i-ty.He has oftenphotographed people looking into hiscamera with a head-on stare that couldbe described as dignified reproach. It’s alook that says, We are resourceful peo-ple, we can cope, but what you see is notgood. (Salgado’s efforts to represent hissubjects this way may have inadvertentlyworked against a larger goal of encour-aging social change; he has rarely shownpeople enraged by,or in revolutionary re-sistance to, their unhappy circumstances.)On the beach, Salgado seemed to besearching for a similar look in the wild-life. Freezing his position in the quarter-crouch of someone who has just begun tosit down, he waited for the penguins tolook at him, and, when they did, it washard not to project into their stare a si-lent plea for the Kyoto Protocol. (Someof the gorillas and tortoises he recentlyphotographed gave him the same look.)“I didn’t wish this from the beginning,”Salgado said, talking of this preferencefor eye contact. “But I’m very interestedin the animal. I pay attention to him, seewhat I can get from him—what is hisface, what is his eyes, what his mind,what his preoccupation? Probably I canget this in pictures, inshallah.”

Salgado stopped in front of a penguinthat was feeding two infants by regurgita-tion, and he became absorbed by thesight. “She’s so proud of them,” he said.He asked for his tripod. He looked andwaited, and each time the adult forced itsbeak down the throat of an infant he tookfive or six photographs, and his singingbecame louder. When he moved away,after an hour or so,during which a fearlesssmall white bird had pecked at my bootfifty times, he said, “It was perfect, thehead on one side, the tail on the other.”Describing how he had constructed theimage,he swept his hands in the air ballet-ically, then drew in my notebook:the adult

bird and the infant below it were togethercurled into the frame,as if into a Matissecollage, forming a low, condensed “S.”

Before we left the beach, Salgadowatched a penguin build a nest by

carrying pebbles in its beak, one by one.When we were back on the ship,he said,“Photography is this disease, this thingthat you fix inside you; you go and yougo. We’re like these birds.Get a stone toput there, get another stone to put there,until he has a nest. We do the same.

“The ‘decisive moment,’ it’s just a slice,”Salgado said, using a phrase associatedwith Cartier-Bresson,who was a friend ofthe Salgados. (A signed Cartier-Bressonprint—a tree-lined country road—is oneof the few photographs on the walls oftheir Paris apartment; another is a pictureof the soccer legends Franz Beckenbauerand Pelé talking to one another, naked, ina postgame communal shower.) Salgadodrew two axes of a graph on a sheet ofpaper, and then a sine curve (signifying the photographed phenomenon), with a horizontal tangent at the top (the pho-tograph). The economist and the photo-journalist were now collaborating. “Youhave a tangent that’s just touching themost perfect moment of the phenome-non,” he said. “That’s the concept of thedecisive moment. But, for me, the mostimportant idea isn’t to have the tangentthat’s zero.” (He wrote this out: “∞ = 0.”)“If you’re a smart guy,with a good camera,with a good eye, you come from outsidethe phenomenon,and—tuk—you get thefabulous image. But long-term storiesare composed of a lot of different waves.The most important thing for me is notwhether the tangent is zero,or minus one,or plus one, but to work inside the phe-nomenon. You are living the phenome-non, and each click is one point. You doyour click at the strongest moment, ofcourse, when you have the perfect light,the perfect albatross, the perfect moun-tain—but then this is another, this is an-other.” He drew more curves, each onebristling with tangents, and then an over-arching curve that encompassed them all.(It has sometimes been thought, even byhis friends, that Salgado could cut downon the multitude of tangents. “Salgado isa good editor,but sometimes his books area little too fat,” Robert Pledge said.)

Salgado did not invent the long-term documentary photographic story.

As he told me, “Guys like W. EugeneSmith worked for years on projects.”ButSmith—to take Salgado’s example—was a Life staff photographer for muchof his career, and struggled to finance hislater independent projects.Salgado,whotook up photography several years beforeSmith’s death, began working in an erawhen few, if any, magazines can under-write multiple tangents from a singlephotographer.The challenge was to finda way to work as if you had a mid-centuryLife contract when you did not.

“I found it frustrating to shoot onestory and jump to another,”Salgado said.He wanted to work symphonically. (Infact, he has looked for a composer towrite music to accompany “Genesis.”)One way to slow the pace was to work in partnership with organizations like theWorld Council of Churches, as he hasdone since the beginning of his career.In 1984 and 1985, he took photographsin Africa’s drought-affected Sahel re-gion, in collaboration with MédecinsSans Frontières,which received proceedsfrom a subsequent book.

Another strategy was to tack personalstories onto commissioned ones. Sal-gado’s 1986 trip to the Serra Pelada goldmine, for example, was made between assignments in South America for twoGerman magazines. Gold had been dis-covered at the remote site—Serra Peladameans “bald mountains”—several yearsearlier, attracting more than fifty thou-sand prospectors, and, in turn, the atten-tion of the media. Time had comparedthe mine to an “outlandish biblical epicmovie”; the Chilean-born artist AlfredoJaar had shown photographs of the mineat the 1986 Venice Biennale. “Everybodyhad shot this story before me,” Salgadosaid. But, as Robert Pledge rememberedit, Salgado said, “I want to do it in black-and-white, for the record. It’s my coun-try, after all.” He went there for threeweeks and shot all day. Because the storywas hardly breaking news, it was anothersix months before Salgado took the timeto look at the photos he had taken. Eventhen, he said, “I thought they were O.K.The reaction was a big surprise.”

The photographs were published firstin the Sunday Times magazine, in London.“He made his name on that story,” ColinJacobson, a leading British photo editor,and the founder of the magazine Report-age, recently recalled. “It was phenome-

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In 1969, the drive from Minneapolisto St. Louis took twelve hours and

was mostly on two-lane roads. Myparents woke me up for it at dawn. Wehad just spent an outstandingly funweek with my Minnesota cousins, butas soon as we pulled out of my uncle’sdriveway these cousins evaporated frommy mind like the morning dew fromthe hood of our car. I was alone in theback seat again. I went to sleep, and mymother took out her magazines, andthe weight of the long July drive fellsquarely on my father.

To get through the day, he madehimself into an algorithm, a numbercruncher. Our car was the axe withwhich he attacked the miles listed onroad signs, chopping the nearlyunbearable 238 down to a still daunting179, bludgeoning the 150s and 140sand 130s until they yielded the halfwayhumane 127, which was roundabledown to 120, which he could pretendwas just two hours of driving time eventhough, with so many livestock trucksand thoughtless drivers on the roadahead of him, it would probably takecloser to three. Through sheer force ofwill, he mowed down the last twentymiles between him and double digits,and these digits he then reduced bytens and twelves until, finally, he couldglimpse it: “Cedar Rapids 34.” Onlythen, as his sole treat of the day, did heallow himself to remember that 34 wasthe distance to the city center—that wewere, in fact, less than thirty miles nowfrom the oak-shaded park where weliked to stop for a picnic lunch.

The three of us ate quietly. Myfather took the pit of a damson plumout of his mouth and dropped it into apaper bag, fluttering his fingers a little.He was wishing he’d pressed on toIowa City—Cedar Rapids wasn’t eventhe halfway point—and I was wishingwe were back in the air-conditionedcar. Cedar Rapids felt like outer space

to me. The warm breeze was someoneelse’s breeze, not mine, and the sunoverhead was a harsh reminder of theday’s relentless waning, and the park’sunfamiliar oak trees all spoke to ourdeep nowhereness. Even my motherdidn’t have much to say.

But the really interminable drivewas through southeastern Iowa. My

father remarked on the height of thecorn, the blackness of the soil, the needfor better roads. My mother loweredthe front-seat armrest and played crazyeights with me until I was just as sick ofit as she was. Every few miles a pigfarm. Another ninety-degree bend inthe road. Another truck with fifty carsbehind it. Each time my father flooredthe accelerator and swung out to pass,my mother drew frightened breath:

“Fffff ! “Ffffffff !“Fffff—FFFFFFFFF!—OH! EARL!

OH! Fffffff ! ”There was white sun in the east and

white sun in the west. Aluminumdomes of silos white against white sky.It seemed as if we’d been drivingsteadily downhill for hours, careeringtoward an ever-receding green furrinessat the Missouri state line. Terrible thatit could still be afternoon. Terrible thatwe were still in Iowa. We had left

behind the convivial planet where mycousins lived, and we were plummetingsouth toward a quiet, dark, air-conditioned house in which I didn’teven recognize loneliness as loneliness,it was so familiar to me.

My father hadn’t said a word in fiftymiles. He silently accepted anotherplum from my mother and, a momentlater, handed her the pit. She unrolledher window and flung the pit into awind suddenly heavy with a smell oftornadoes. What looked like dieselexhaust was rapidly filling the southernsky. A darkness gathering at three inthe afternoon. The endless downslopesteepening, the tasselled corn tossing,and everything suddenly green—skygreen, pavement green, parents green.

My father turned on the radio andsorted through crashes of static to finda station. He had remembered—ormaybe never forgotten—that anotherdescent was in progress. There wasstatic on static on static, crazy assaultson the signal’s integrity, but we couldhear men with Texan accents reportinglower and lower elevations, countingthe mileage down toward zero. Then awall of rain hit our windshield with aroar like deep-fry. Lightningeverywhere. Static smashing the Texanvoices, the rain on our roof louder thanthe thunder, the car shimmying inlateral gusts.

“Earl, maybe you should pull over,”my mother said. “Earl?”

He had just passed milepost 2, andthe Texan voices were getting steadier,as if they’d figured out that the staticcouldn’t hurt them: that they weregoing to make it. And, indeed, thewipers were already starting to squeak,the road drying out, the black cloudsshearing off into harmless shreds. “TheEagle has landed,” the radio said. We’dcrossed the state line. We were backhome on the moon.

—Jonathan Franzen

ARE WE THERE YET?

COUNTDOWN

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nal.The photographs had that apocalypticfeel—they conveyed a contemporary liv-ing hell.They were brilliant photographs.I think they are still his very best work.”

The Serra Pelada photographs helpedSalgado move ahead with an ambitiousidea: to compile a giant almanac of phys-ical labor—tuna fishermen in Sicily, coalminers in India, and many others. Theproject, whose full title is “Workers: AnArcheology of the Industrial Age,” tooksix years. It was shot globally (in twenty-six countries) and distributed globally;the pictures were instantly legible, as sadand catchy and broadly appealing as anElton John song. “Workers” had the se-ductive ambition of comprehensiveness;it wanted to show the whole earth, likethose first, blue shots of the world seen

from space. And by sheer force of com-position, it seemed, Salgado was look-ing to find coherence in a combination ofsocial optimism and social pessimism.These were romantic photographs ofwhat the Marxist economist in Salgadoknew to be the exploitation of labor.“History is above all a succession of chal-lenges, of repetitions, of perseverances,”he wrote in the introduction to the bookin which the photographs were collected.“It’s an endless cycle of oppressions, hu-miliations, and disasters, but also a testa-ment to man’s ability to survive.”

“Workers” was a feat of financing asmuch as it was an achievement in thor-oughness, and in sustained seriousness.(Salgado has never taken a photographthat could not be accompanied, in a tele-

vision documentary, by the sound of asolo cello.) “He really took charge of hisown career,” Jacobson said.“He became aproduction person, providing stories onhis own terms.” Salgado explained to methat he persuaded several magazines tosign up for the stories in “Workers” in ad-vance,“so it was possible to cover my bud-get and produce my stories, completelyfree to produce my stories.No one maga-zine had priority. I organized this. This iseconomics.” It has been said that morepeople saw “Workers,” in its various trav-elling exhibitions, than any other show inthe history of photography.

Salgado has sometimes had an awk-ward relationship with other photogra-phers.“When you produce a lot, you takea lot of space, and people are afraid ofyou,”he said to me. In the early nineteen-nineties, as Salgado finished “Workers”and began his next project—a study ofdisplaced people, known as “Migra-tions”—his relationship with Magnumended. As he remembered it, “Oh boy,a big, big fight.” Although the conflictseems to have had its roots in resentmentof Salgado’s new fame, and his perceivedegotism, it took the particular form ofa disagreement about internal reforms ofMagnum.Salgado had suggested restruc-turing the agency: dividing the photo-journalists from the art photographers;healso wanted each photographer to make agreater financial investment in the coöp-erative.These ideas were resisted.Despitea moment when Cartier-Bresson, then inhis eighties, sought to prevent Salgadofrom leaving a Magnum meeting by bar-ring the way with his body, Salgado re-signed,and formed Amazonas with Lélia.“I knew that if I don’t leave Magnum Iwill die,” he told me. “Not that I will diephysically, but I will die like many of theold Magnum photographers who weredead—because they were not photogra-phers anymore, they were eating eachother, fighting, politics. Because photog-raphers must be out shooting, the planet isthere to do incredible stories, and to seethese photographers sixty years old, sixty-five years old, you know, become com-pletely bitter—for me, that is death.”

Each day on board Tara, Salgadowoke up early and photographed

all day. He made the claim—it seemedimplausible at first—that his mind neverwandered. He said that he never day-

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“Gee, I always figured him for No. 1!”

• •

dreamed about his family, his taxes, orBrazilian soccer, which he still follows.He was able to look, and do nothing but look. He said that he saw the worldin black-and-white. (“The lettuce, that’sgray,” he told me during lunch one day.“The pie is pale gray.The wine is black.”)Salgado has a recurring irritation in hisleft eye, because he keeps it squeezedshut for so much of the time.

In Antarctica, the sun still shone ateleven o’clock in the evening, so whenSalgado went onshore he worked longdays. For his companions, who couldmove neither too far ahead nor too far be-hind, for fear of wandering into Salgado’sframe, the days sometimes seemed evenlonger. It was like being tied to him by arope. Then, one afternoon, four of uswere tied to him by a rope, as we walkedup a gently sloping glacier above a smallBritish base called Port Lockroy, ourboots breaking through a crust of hard iceto the icy mush beneath. Salgado walkedsecond to last in line. He stopped andstarted and stopped again,as he sought tocompensate for the fact that the right sideof the view did not quite do justice to theleft. (Some dark bare rocks interrupted awhite curve of ice.) The four of us werebound to stop and start, too; when helooked at the view,we looked at the sameview.The sky was as clear and blue as theview from an aircraft at thirty thousandfeet. As we moved higher up the glacier,and the scene became more and more toSalgado’s liking, his tugs on the rope be-came more frequent. He brought us to ahalt as if we were sled dogs. Some hoursinto the walk,we changed order and Sal-gado was given the lead.

Some similar rearranging had hap-pened, on a larger scale, during the firstdays in Antarctica, when one could see adiscrepancy between those who saw thetrip as a vacation—or an extreme-sportsadventure—and Salgado’s more medita-tive ideas about travelling.When he wasalone on deck, Salgado would some-times say, “The guys below are probablymissing one of the most beautiful thingsof their lives.”His intensity,when work-ing, could inspire a kind of shame inone’s own lack of stamina, and in one’swillingness to read and gossip ratherthan at all times commune with thescenery. It was like visiting an art gallerywith someone able to study a single por-trait for a full afternoon. In contrast to

Salgado, the rest of us took photographsthat seemed to be a kind of defenseagainst the unease that can creep intoour response to the sublime—a shieldagainst the guilt attached to not know-ing how to fix one’s gaze on somethingspectacular that one will never see again.

Salgado’s shipmates wanted to meetgoals—to get as high above Antarctica aspossible, or as far below, or as far south asthe ice would allow. But they could notlose themselves inside the landscape as hecould.The alpine guide flew low over theboat in an engine-powered paraglider thathe had carried from France. The sailorwith the trumpet played “La Vie en Rose”loudly on the deck, the sound bouncingoff the icebergs around us. We drankcocktails, listened to reggae, and watchedBourgois take pleasure in the task of nos-ing Tara through the slabs of ice that werebecoming denser as we moved south.Sal-gado was puzzled by the hurry and noise.“We’re not here to go on an autoroute,”hesaid.“So maybe we won’t see three things,but we will see this one thing.” In whatseemed a warning about the easygoingmood on board the boat, one day weheard an unnerving exchange over theopen channel on the radio—a doctor giv-ing instructions in English to peoplenearby who were evidently caring forsomeone very seriously injured. We laterlearned that a British man, a successfulbusinessman sailing his own yacht, haddied after falling down a crevasse at theglacier where we had been roped together.

Salgado also became frustrated by theinfluence that the two men from theFrench TV show were having on Tara’smovements. Salgado liked them person-ally, but their hunger for footage aggra-vated him. One morning, after the shiphad sailed as far down the peninsula aspossible before being stopped by ice, andhad then turned around, we came to asudden stop at the sight of a leopard sealon a low-riding iceberg. One of the TV

men took an inflatable boat to film it.(In the rush to get the dinghy launched,Bourgois’s cousin fell into the water; aftera moment, he was back on deck.) At thetime, Salgado was standing at the bow,studying the way that the light was fall-ing on the ice cliffs.“I was concentrating,”he later said. “With all this ice breaking in the water, completely different shapeswere forming, and I started to see a hugemegalopolis, a huge town, incredible city,with vertical shapes,with round shapes—all geometric forms. I was organizing mymind inside this space, and the light wasso nice,so beautiful,because we had someshafts going inside the ice, and made vol-ume.Then they break for the phoque, andthey destroyed me!” (For “seal,” Salgadoswitched to French, and seemed to enjoyspitting out the word.) “It broke com-pletely my concentration,” he said.

Salgado went down into the maincabin. “We must talk about this,” he saidto Bourgois politely. Later that day, at ameeting around the ship’s dining table,Salgado complained about the perceivedencroachment of the TV show’s agenda.(Bourgois had given him the impressionthat he was the only person on board pay-ing for more than living costs, althoughthe French program had, in fact, made asimilar contribution.) He also pressed forgreater environmental seriousness. “Wehave to show more respect to the envi-ronment,” he said. “This is a UNEP boat,an environmental boat,we can’t be agitat-ing animals.We can’t be making a noise.”Salgado was quiet when others spoke;he examined a little dispenser of coloredPost-it tabs being used by the televisiondirector, Gil Kebaili, to mark pages in aglossy book on Antarctica. (There wereseveral of these books on board, but Sal-gado never opened them, being keen toavoid visual preconceptions: “I’m com-pletely open for what comes,I have no or-ganized idea.”He made an exception onlyfor the work of Frank Hurley, the pho-tographer on Shackleton’s expedition.)

Salgado had the deck to himself thatafternoon, and a new authority.Tara hadevolved into a taxi. When Kebaili cameup on deck, he did not carry his camera.

Paging through the “Migrations”bookat Tara’s dining table one morn-

ing, Salgado commented on a double-page photograph of Rwandan refugeesin makeshift tents in Tanzania in 1994,

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and formed the “T” of a time-out. Hewas done. “This is the best photographI’ve taken so far,” he said. “Here I’ll seewhat I was looking for when I camehere. One picture I have. Now I onlyneed forty-nine.”

W.Eugene Smith, the Life photog-rapher, once acknowledged that

he was “always torn between the atti-tude of the journalist, who is a recorderof facts, and the artist, who is often nec-essarily at odds with the facts.” Salgadomakes no similar acknowledgment.“I’mnot an artist,”he told me.“An artist makesan object. Me, it’s not an object, I workin history, I’m a storyteller.”

We were walking through freezingdrizzle on Deception Island, a horseshoeof volcanic rock and ice, a last stoppingpoint on our way north toward a rendez-vous at the peninsula’s sole,gravel airstrip,on King George Island,where a plane wasdue to pick up Bourgois and a few others,including myself.“I can be an artist a pos-teriori, not a priori,” Salgado said. “If mypictures tell the story, our story, humanstory, then in a hundred years, then theycan be considered an art reference, butnow they are not made as art. I’m a jour-nalist. My life’s on the road, my studio isthe planet.” He recalled a carved pot forgrain storage that he had recently seen inan exhibition of African art. “It was sowell carved, so well done. It was not builtas art, it was built for their life, and becameart. I believe the pictures that I do are thesame thing. They have a function. I tell a story. I’m telling about the shit of thisplanet, or we will not survive as a people.”

When Salgado,who is forever in searchof beauty, insists on being understoodonly as a reporter, he risks sounding likeKeats claiming no more than an ornitho-logical interest in nightingales—and per-haps he should not be taken too seriously.But while there is a kind of modesty inthe stance, there is also a hint of immod-esty in imagining that one’s singular visionof the world will be accepted as transpar-ent and purely practical—although Sal-gado has always been helped in that claimby his audience’s knowledge that he is aformer economist who takes his politicsseriously. (For example, the critic DavidLevi Strauss has written that Salgado’swork is substantially different from “mostsocial documentary work,” owing to “hisbackground in Brazil and his understand-

under a sky that looked almost black insome areas, and almost white in others.“The situation is unbelievable, and thelight is unbelievable,” he said, softly, andthe adjective had to make a suddenchange in complexion between its twoappearances.

It is often said that photographers likeSalgado run a risk when they turn povertyand discomfort into well-composed im-ages. According to this line of criticism,the beauty of a Salgado photograph cansmother,or cheapen, the human woe rep-resented. (Salgado finds this responsemaddening, and once considered hiring a lawyer after such an attack was pub-lished.) A related argument takes issuewith such photographs migrating fromtheir traditional places of distribution—that is, magazines and newspapers—tolose their captions and become a com-modity traded in galleries,bought by mu-seums, and hung above water beds inpenthouse apartments. In one of the leastguarded of these kinds of complaint, LeMonde once described a Paris exhibitionof Salgado’s “Migrations”photographs as“nauseating” and “kitsch,” in an articlethat ran under the headline “SALGADO,OR THE EXPLOITATION OF COMPASSION.”(“They were trying to kill him,”Lélia saidto me.) In response, Salgado insists thathis photographs are not as calculated ashis critics imagine. “I don’t know how tomake an un-composition, if there is thisword in English,”he said to me.“It comesnaturally. That must be very hard, themost hard thing in the planet. You workin a space! You have a space, you mustdeal with it, you must have some har-mony in this space.”

Salgado—who does sell prints, but inunlimited editions,with the exception of aplanned edition of “Genesis” prints, andwho has always aimed for as wide a distri-bution of his images as possible—sug-gested to me that his Brazilian birth pro-tects him from some of the issues ofconscience that may trouble photojour-nalists from First World countries. Bycontrast,he said,a British photojournalistsuch as Don McCullin, whom Salgadoadmires, must take into account that “hecomes from a country that went to India,went to Africa, and the British owe a debt, for what they did around the world.”He continued, “When I was young andpart of the Communist Party,we workedvery close to the part of the society that

was less privileged in Brazil. I come fromthis. And when I show these pictures I’mshowing a problem that I am inside. AndI never made money with these things.The money went back into photography,or into social projects.” (Salgado appearsto be far less materialistic than his earn-ing power could permit, beyond showinga warm appreciation of well-made thingsthat allow him to function more efficientlyin his work.When I asked him to tell meabout the extravagances in his life, hethought for a while and then said,“I haveabout twenty penknives.”)

The afternoon after the chastening ofthe TV crew, Tara was cruising on stillwater when Salgado looked down a sidechannel that ended in a glacier and askedthat the ship be turned into it. Therewere, in fact, glaciers in every direction,but Salgado was struck by something inthe combination of the ice, the moun-tains that framed it, the clouds hangingonto the mountains, and the dark gray ofthe sea directly in front of the ice cliffs.Given the clarity of the dry air, and theabsence of people (we saw perhaps a sin-gle boat a day) and almost all plant andanimal life, it was difficult to judge dis-tances; it seemed possible that the photo-graph Salgado envisaged could be takenat a spot a few miles away.

As we moved toward the glacier, thetemperature fell and the wind rose fromnothing to forty knots. The sea turnedchoppy.What had felt like a bracing dayat the top of a ski lift took on a threat-ening texture.Salgado was thrilled.“Thelight was flat,flat,but now we’re in orbit,”he said, after taking a picture.

The cold became extreme; the windscreamed off the glacier. “Oh, what amagnificent thing!” Salgado said, guid-ing the captain, who was standing sev-enty feet behind him, with mittenedhands, like an airport worker guiding ajet to a gate.The sea in front had turnedalmost black. The wind cut through adozen layers of clothes. Salgado’s noseran, and he could barely move his fingerswhen he changed films; the cold crackedthe skin around his fingernails.

The glacier was, in fact, many milesaway. We sailed until we were directlyunder jagged hundred-and-fifty-foot ice cliffs. Then Salgado shouted, “Stop,stop.”The wind dropped suddenly—wewere now sheltered by the cliffs—andSalgado raised his hands above his head,

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ing,as an economist,of the social and po-litical background of the people and situ-ations he photographs.”)

Just as “Workers” and “Migrations”did not have explicit political messagesbut, rather, seemed to have bold compen-diousness as their governing principles,the agenda of “Genesis” is somewhatopaque. Salgado is ecologically serious, asthe Instituto Terra suggests, but it wouldworry some environmentalists to hear himtake encouragement from the sheer abun-dance of glaciers in Antarctica. (Whereothers see shrinking ice, Salgado saw aton of ice.) Salgado has said that “Gene-sis” will include photographs not just ofanimals but of people living technologi-cally simple lives in the Amazon basinand elsewhere. He told me that he wasaiming to show the earth as it was somefour thousand years ago—although it wasnot clear why he had chosen that daterather than, say, forty thousand years ago.It’s not yet obvious what “Genesis” is, andhow it will not be “Planète Cousteau”;and it seems significant that when theGuardian, for example, has run these newphotographs the accompanying story hasbeen about Salgado’s visit to the place.Travelling to the ends of the earth,he be-comes the center of attention.

The truth, of course, is that Salgado’swork has an emotional impact—not leastin its underlying argument for a sense of common humanity, or common ani-mality—that is separate from its infor-mational load. (This fact is acknowl-edged when Salgado publishes captionsat the back of his books, rather thanagainst each image.) One can know theSerra Pelada photographs well but stillbe surprised when Salgado talks aboutthe actual daily routine, and the socialbackground, of those miners. And it’sinteresting to see the contact sheets fromthat story, neatly filed among the othersin Paris. The most famous Serra Peladaphotograph—perhaps the best-knownSalgado photograph—is one that is re-ferred to in his office as “The Hand.” Aminer has reached the top of a ladder,with a sack of dirt on his back, and thepit below him. He is pulling himself upthe last step. The hand of another man is reaching into the frame, apparently in the direction of the straining miner, ina way that echoes an older composition,on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. (“Ahand,open, reaches out from nowhere to

the miner struggling up the slope, flat-tened by his burden,” Eduardo Galeanowrote in an essay for a 1990 Salgado ret-rospective.) But it’s odd to learn from thecomic strip of before-and-after providedby the contact sheet that the stray hand isnot actually reaching; it’s the hand ofsomeone walking ahead of the subject,caught mid-swing.

As we walked on Deception Island,through the mist, Salgado talked aboutSerra Pelada—a fairly large group ofthose miners were raising money for sexchanges, he said—and then, in a relaxed,pre-photograph mood, he led the groupin “Cucurrucucú Paloma,” the traditionalMexican song performed by Caetano Ve-loso in the Pedro Almódovar film “Talkto Her.” (Veloso is a friend.) At midday,he did an interview with French radio via the satellite telephone, which he oth-erwise used to call Lélia each evening.When he finished, we turned a corner tofind that we were looking along a ridgethat curved up and around in the shape ofa Nike swoosh flipped upside down; oneside of the ridge rose gently from a long,broad valley, and the other swept steeplydown to a beach of black sand. All acrossthe valley, and along the ridge, chinstrappenguins were standing on pebble nestsevenly spaced a foot or so from eachother, in colonies of a hundred or fivehundred or a thousand, like subdivisionsin a suburban sprawl. We could see per-haps two hundred and fifty thousand

birds. “Amazing,” said Salgado, more ex-cited than I’d seen him before.

Part of the appeal of penguins is thatthey choose to live where people wouldlive if they colonized the same space, andthey live on the ground,and they walk at ahuman pace. Looking over the valley, wecould see countless birds making their waydown paths to the sea; small paths led towider ones,and these emptied into a mainthoroughfare that took the birds down tothe beach, where they dived into the surfto fish, becoming as agile as dolphins.Each wave slung onto the sand a dozen orso penguins that had finished feeding; asthey came out of the water they immedi-ately lost their marine grace, and thenbegan struggling up the same paths to re-turn to their nests. Thousands were mov-ing in each direction. The noise of theirscreeching echoed across the valley—thesound of a hall with a high ceiling packedwith people shouting. “The Serra Peladaof penguins,” Salgado said, making theunavoidable comparison,even at the slightmoral risk of connecting Brazilian laborerswith flightless seabirds. “Never in my lifehave I seen something so beautiful. In-credible, incredible, incredible.” He raisedhis arms in front of the view, and saidsomething I didn’t catch, and then ex-plained,“It was a voodoo word.I’m askingfor light. I’m asking for this mist to open,asking nature to open for me, because Ineed the light. It will come.”When it did,he said,“Thank you, God.” ♦

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“You’ll be a perfect addition to our expendable workforce.”

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