| HOME | ABOUT | ART | TRAVEL | PHOTOS | PRINTS |
|
Art in Japan>Photography>Sebastiao Salgado: Exodus Original articles on art, artists, architecture, exhibitions, galleries, museums and cultural institutions around Tokyo, Japan. Sebastiao Salgado: Exodusby John McGee  Sebastiao Salgado, Orphanage attached to the
hospital at Kibumba There's no Moses setting people free in Sebastiao Salgado's tales of exodus. War, repression and want have forced these migrations. And the promised lands are often distant, disappointing and overcrowded. One of the world's most celebrated photojournalists, Salgado, 58, started out as an economist. After switching to photography in 1973, he worked for agencies like Gamma, Magnum and finally his own, Amazonas Images. His body of work includes a number of acclaimed documentary photo-essays like "Other Americas" (on Latin American peasant culture) and "Workers" (on large-scale manual labor). The 300 black-and-white photos in "Exodus"—shot in 40 countries between 1994 and 1999—are a short visual history of recent socio-political and economic strife, as well as natural disasters, arranged in sections on migrants and refugees, war-torn Africa, Latin American disorder, Asia's burgeoning cities and displaced children. 
Sebastiao Salgado, Displaced Kurd Series of photos rather than single, Pulitzer Prize-caliber shots, sketch the tense atmosphere of people in their transitional environments: endless lines of Rwandan orphans sit on train tracks hoping for food and water distributions, Bosnians wait for mail inside their razor wire encampments. Political refugees may never find home again. Economic immigrants, on the other hand, search for something more in the big city or a foreign land. But in their destinations—Saigon, Jakarta, Bombay—they often find bewilderment and hardship: street kids sniff glue in Sao Paulo; an itinerant sleeps on top of a grave in Manila; scavengers push an overloaded horse cart over a mountain of garbage in Mexico City. Not all is despair. Salgado finds promise in Mozambique refugees returning home after 15 years in exile, Russian Jews emigrating to New York, and landless Brazilian peasants expropriating unproductive plantations. At their worst, Salgado's images court the fascination of the abomination, e.g. bloated bodies float under a Tanzanian waterfall (but is there a better way to present this?), and romanticization of ethnic people, e.g. threatened Amazon Indians pose in edenic, forest-dappled sunlight. At their best, his photos are complex and haunting—a tiny Mexican kid strides through the open field and strings of pirated electrical wires that delineate his desolate slum, turning his filthy, ash-encrusted, mask-like face to the camera with an unmistakable "what the hell you lookin' at?" expression. One of the most powerful parts of this show is a roomful of huge portraits of anonymous displaced kids. Torn rags for clothes, dirty but smiling faces—these poster children of calamity aren't bored teens from some Calvin Klein suburb.
Sebastiao Salgado, A victim of
war struggling on his crutches along Jade Unlike newspaper photos, which shape carnage into digestible packets of evil that spare readers the horror of details, names and faces, Salgado's photo-essays reveal particularities, showing us what those who live it see everyday. This show, however, is like a seven-day, seven-country bus tour through the regions of misery—it covers too much and provides too little history. In the exhibition catalogue, Salgado acknowledges that his photos offer no answers, but that he hopes to inspire people to "become truly concerned about what is going on in the world." If the exhibition had more background about why the events in the photos occur, then viewers might feel informed enough to truly act rather than merely alleviate their guilt by dropping a coin in the UNHCR collection boxes at the exit. _______________________________________The Sebastiao Salgado: Exodus exhibition was held Sept-Oct 2002 at Bunkamura Museum of Art in Shibuya, Tokyo. ©2006 John McGee |
| CONTACT | TERMS | LINKS |
|
©2006-2008 John McGee. All Rights Reserved. No part of this site may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission. |