Sabastiao Salgado

There is an excellent article on Migrating Populations with his photographs in the new APERTURE (Vol. 163). Does anyone know what film(s) and developer(s) he uses? In some pictures the grain is so gritty that it's the first thing one sees, while in others even the sky has a beautiful smooth texture.

Check this out:

 

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http://www.kodak.com/global/en/professional/features/legendsV3Q5/legen

dsIndex.shtml

 

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I have read elsewhere that Salgado uses Tri-X and T-Max P3200 (at EI

1600) exclusively. I wouldn't doubt that in a pinch he pushes the TMZ

to 3200 (thus "gritty" grain). I've never read anything about his

choice of developer, but since there's nothing "unusual" about the

look of his Tri-X pix, I would bet D-76 1:1 or maybe now Xtol,

particularly if his film is souped by a lab.

I have read the same about his used film, can´t say any thing about

developer, but his huge prints in "Workers" exposition, looked

beautifuly grained.

He uses TriX and TMZ, both developed in Rodinal (exclusively).

I was using Tri x in rodinal long before i even knew who Salgado

was.I think he copied my style! I remember reading around the

time of his Gulf war photo's that he was sponsored by Kodak to

use TMZ. If this is true then i don,t think agfa chemistry would be

used. I have had plenty of experience with TRIX in Rodinal and it

does give a similar feel. My main influence would have to be

Jean Loup-Sief. Leica M3 ,21mm lens ,trix in d76,Great

photographer and not as well known as he should be.He can

shoot anything well.Buy the way, I also read that Salgado was

using 3 R6 bodies. 1 with a 28,1 with a 35, 1 with a 60 and a

80mm in his bag.On one of the bodies he would leave his leitz

B & S head with table tripod.He said he didn't like changing

lenses.He also comented that he felt very lucky to be able to

shoot only black and white film.I agree ,unless the light is great

when shooting colour your shots will be average, This is why

even National Geo photographers shoot with flash ,press

style.Personaly i don't like it.

" . . . Jean Loup-Sief. Leica M3 ,21mm lens ,trix in d76,Great

photographer and not as well known as he should be."

Sorry, I thought he was one of the best known photogs today . . .

Or the "backs" he pictures, at least.

Great, anyhow !

Cheers.

 

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-Iván

Bill:

 

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Salgado use Kodak stuff exclusively, as they sponsor his exhibitions

and provide him with materials. Same with the Leicas he uses, both Ms

and Rs.

 

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As R Watson has said, his "Workers" exhibit, live and in Black &

White is truly impressive: as good quality as you will ever see from

35 and the Grain helps many of his shots. Brazilian gold miners do

not have the same aura about them as Brittney Spears.

 

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There is a lot of info on him as well as an intrevioew in Photo

Techniques magazine a few years ago- the one with a picture of an

Indian shipbreaker carrying a steel disc on his shoulder. The book

(Workers-an Archeology of the Industrial Age)is well worth the 100

Bucks for anyone intersted in amazing human beings and phenominal

photographs.

 

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Cheers

 

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Tri-X and T MAX3200 in D 76 or HC 110 on Kodak paper.

Bill:

 

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The website referenced above did not load on my machine. but this did

www.kodak.com/global/en/professional/features/legendsV3Q5/legendsIndex

.shtml --- after I searched a bit (30 secs through to Professionals

gallery Archive. There is some other reat stuff there too, that any

photog would be interested in. Pete Turner WOW.

 

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Cheers

in June I saw the Migrations exhibition in Europe. The photographs

were some of the most moving I have ever seen and the print quality

was just unbelievable. There were perhaps some 200 black and white

prints.

 

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The majority of prints were about 24 x 16 inches, with some at 30 x

20 inches. Grain was not intrusive, in fact barely noticable,

except in some obvious low light/high film speed shots.

 

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If you can see this exhibition, I believe that you will be extremely

impressed with the photographer and the technique.

Bears mentioning that the Salgado 'Migrations' exhibit is

currently on view at the Institute of Contemporary Photography (or

is the International Center for Photography? In either case it's

ICP) at 43rd and 6th Avenue in New York City. Make SURE that

you give yourself enough time to see the whole thing. I made the

mistake of going about 2 hours before closing and pacing

myself for what I assumed was just one floor's worth of

photographs, I didn't even suspect that there were just as many

on the basement level.

 

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On the way out I stopped in the little book shop and they were

playing a video tape that's available there for sale. In the video

Salgado was going through some of his contact sheets, and I

was astonished by how consistently amazing his photography

is. Every single shot was well-exposed, well-composed, in

focus, beautiful, etc. I've never seen anything like it. The showed

a sequence - it was a portrait of a boy - that I thought was really

telling. In the first the shot the boy is smiling really broadly, and in

each successive shot (as the boy became more comfortable?)

the smile recedes until the final shot - which was in the show -

has this truth and emotional intensity about it that really, really

gets across the horror of his experience. There's a lot to be

learned from all of it, chiefly that this type of photography is about

personal relationships, a natural ease with technique, and lots

of work.

I have borrowed from the library both WORKERS and MIGRATIONS several

times and I am in awe of Salgado's visiona and achievement. But I

think we should remember that he is backed by immense resources in

terms of money, personel, and expertise. A look at his own thank-you

notes and the credits will show that once he has made the exposure

there is a whole team of people to process, proof-print, select,

edit, make exhibition prints and generally organize behind the focus

of his vision. I doubt if projects the size of WORKERS or MIGRATIONS

would be possible without the craft and talent of all those people

and especially his print makers.

Last night I went to the local Left party bash (the Festa del Unità,

it's called) and the Salgado Migrations project was on show.

 

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I came away from it with very mixed feelings, and it was great to see

these famous pictures in the flesh as it really cleared up a lot of

my thinking about his work. First of all, to my surprise, I was

struck by how his most effective snaps are actually landscapes, the

monumental big photos of refugee camps or cityscapes seen from a

distance. The printing was impeccable, of course, magnificent. But

the human content was mostly, IMO, just not there. I was left with

the impression of someone who has spent a life time rushing from one

disaster to the next and many of the pictures were, I thought,

hurried and totally lacking in empathy with their subjects. The

people are there to illustrate a variety of theses, but as people in

themselves are absent from the pictures. A large number of snaps with

people staring gormlessly at the camera, the sort of thing that would

go straight in the bin from my lightbox. Often with a single detail,

like a dove or a hand intruding into the frame as the only detail of

interest. Cover it up and the picture is dead.

 

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But mostly, a complete lack of humour. People in refugee camps or

slums do occasionally smile, crack jokes or smoke a cigarette over a

game of cards, but this is totally absent from Salgado's portrayal of

them. Again, the portrayal is ideological and real life must not

intrude. There is a lack of intimacy and contact.

 

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Does this sound totally negative? It's just my take. JD said to me

just yesterday that he thought SS was bigger and better than HCB, but

having seen this exhibit, I vastly prefer Henri. His photography has

a vastly greater emotional range, is fresher and not ideologically

driven.

 

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Maybe it's jealousy! But I came away feeling that the whole SS

project is deeply flawed. It seems to serve the same purpose as

Mother Teresa of Calcutta, a point of reference and confirmation of

our feeling that the third world is the third world instead of a

human reality. Frankly, it's a ripoff and - whatever Salgado's

personal motivation, which I don't question here at all - I don't

think it promotes understanding of its subjects.

 

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Just a Sunday morning rant after a sleepless night!

Good for you, Rob!! Very insightful and very articulate indeed.

 

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I admire his Salgado's work greatly, as also his motivations, but am

wary of both left politics of class struggle as well as the huge

school (if a bent of mind in the West can be called that) of

refugee/charity/poverty photography that has been around since at

least the early 1950s.

 

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People in the third world really get the short end of the stick from

many supposedly "humanist" photographers. Those "gormless"

expressions,IMHO, are often the result of violated personal space,

but passed off by photographer and reinterpreted by the "concerned"

audience, as being representative of the human condition (i.e.

traumatized suffering) in the Third World.

 

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That people everywhere have lives, families, weddings, celebrations,

jokes, annoyance, stress etc. etc. is usually unrecorded. To do so

requires time, commitment, involvement and honesty on the part of the

visiting photographer.

 

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Salgado is indeed very good technically, but his images are pure

propaganda, serving an end that is laudable-but the supposed

beneficiaries are perhaps being transformed into art object of

suffering sometimes...

In the 1930s, Peggy Bourke-White made stunning photographs of poor

Southern people, (basically dropping down out of the sky, posing and

shooting them, then out the door), for her book "You Have Seen Their

Faces." Superficial? Oh yes, but 75 years later we can see the

conditions that these people suffered, and can feel for them. At

about the same time, Dorother Lange was making her famous

photographs, mostly in California. When I see the Lange pictures, I

wonder who these people were, how they got into the terrible

situations they were in, what happened to them afterwards. Two

points of view, both valid. Similarly, Salgado's POV is more to

document the situation and it's relation to humanity, than to focus

on individuals. I admire all three of these great photographers, and

their work.

I suppose my feeling is that the situation only exists in its

particularity. Theory (and ideology) is all very well but must be

limited by "things as they are" in each separate situation. However

Salgado has an overarching project which leaves no space for this

perception. For instance, he has pictures of Bombay in this show

which do not show at all what Bombay is, but portray it as a refugee

camp. The incredible energy and entrepreneurialism of the Bombay

slums is completely missing from his snaps. I don't think that serves

the subjects well, indeed, I think it simply reinforces the self-

serving western stereotypes about the developing world which it's

time we put behind us. We have to understand that the world outside

the affluent west does not consist of beggars and refugees living in

the gutter, that people are fully capable of bulding their lives

without handouts from the aid organisations and standing on their own

feet. I don't get this feeling from SS's work, which rather portrays

everything as a humanitarian disaster zone.

 

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I don't deny the power of many of his images, merely their intent.

However, I was also surprised to see a very large number of turkeys

in the show alongside the sublime iconic images. I've always been a

fan of his work, but am much less so now after seeing this show,

indeed I would go so far as to say that his work (its informing

project, so to speak) is diametrically opposed to what I'd like to

achieve in my own snapping.

BTW, rereading that last post, I hope it's evident that I'm not

comparing my work to SS's or setting myself up as an alternative to

him in any sense.

 

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Sorry if that's the impression I gave to anyone.

Don't give it a second thought, Rob.

I have been a fan of Sebastiao Salgado since the 1980s. At that time

he was not a 'star' and did not have a huge support staff or

corporate sponsors. I remember reading about him leaving his job as

an Economist at the International Coffee Organization (?) and going

back to Latin America to document the working life of common people.

He talked about buying Kodak TriX film in bulk and then loading them

at home into 35mm cartridges. The first few years were very

difficult because few magazines or newspapers wanted to buy his black

and white photos of working people. Most of them preferred color

photos of celebrities! Salgado's photos of the famine in Ethiopia in

the 1980s, and of the gold miners in Brazil, changed everything and

catapulted him into the ranks of the top documentary/concerned

photographers in the world.

 

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Salgado's style, philosophy, and objectives and evolved substantially

in the last two decades. One of his original intentions was to

document a disappearing way of life in the Third World - people

engaged in manual labor. The WORKERS book was the culmination of

that project. MIGRATIONS is a very different project in scope and

scale, looking at the effect of war and poverty on the populations of

very poor Third World countries.

 

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It is true, at least in the MIGRATIONS book, that Salgado does not

give you a complete picture of the life of displaced or poor people.

Even people who have no material possessions will have moments of

laughter and joy in their lives, something that you do not see in the

photos. Salgado does refer to this in a recent interview in American

Photo magazine, and also in the book CHILDREN (?).

 

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I think that regardless of Salgado's politics or agenda, many of the

photographs are breathtaking, and will be considered classic works of

the genre...................

Wilheim?!

 

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Rob, you say "I hope it's evident that I'm not comparing my work to

SS's or setting myself up as an alternative to him in any sense. "

 

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Aside from the usual considerations of modesty and respect for

Salgado's intentions, sincerity, toil, and obvious achievement, why

not?

 

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I hope you don't feel precluded from making the comparision on

artistic or intellectual grounds...

Salgado quiz: Sebastiao Salgado took which famous and widely-published

spot-news photo in 1981? A yellow Hasselblad (Minox reproduction) or

one of Jack's sour apple martinis to the winner.

reagan assassination attempt?

I,m with you Rob. I remember seeing Salgado,s work alongside many

others including the likes of 'Mary Ellen Mark', 'Cartier-Bresson',

'Steve Mccurry' & 'Raghu Rai' in London about 5 years ago in the

roving 'India' exhibition. His work failed to move me as the others

did, technically excellent yes, beautifully printed yes, capturing

the essence of his subject, no.

Good for him if he is now in Manhatan, at the other side of any

bridge adding photos to "Migrations"; for the sad it should be.

It was the Reagan assassination attempt, wasn't it, Andy? And you'd

better watch what you promise -- I might drive down to Denver to

collect that martini (check my email address if you think I'm

kidding)!

Doug and Rob: You both win. Sorry it took so long to get back to this

- some distractions in the past week.

 

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Salgado took pictures from across the street - his was the panoramic

shot with Brady and McCarthy lying on the sidewalk being aided and two

Secret Service agents crouching with drawn Uzis, watching the rooftops

- in color, as well, instead of his more famous B&W.