Photographing beauty and dignity

Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado dedicated his life to exploring, discovering, and photographically expressing the beauty of our world, of nature, of people, humans and animals, of life. He also denounced situations of injustice and suffering due to avoidable social, economic, and other causes. It has sometimes been said that Salgado aestheticized misery and social denunciation. On the contrary, I believe that this photographic beauty arose from an attention to reality, from a poetic truth, and that it has an ethical dimension, as it grants due dignity to the people photographed, who deserve this attention and expressive care.

There are those who are afraid of beauty. There are contemporary art historians, critics, and curators who are suspicious of the enthusiasm that the beauty of the world, of its beings, of life can generate. They prefer to settle in conflict, in resentment, or even in puritanical poverty. And for this reason, they are also suspicious of beauty and poetry, of the possible elevation, of the mystery of works of art, especially when it comes to contemporary art. By thus rejecting mystery, they will never be able to understand art in all its depth. On the contrary, there are artists who, consciously or unconsciously, fulfill precisely that mission, entrusted to no one, intimate: to remember, discover, and reveal the beauty and mystery of nature, of people, and of things, in order to fully recognize them, and perhaps admire them, and of course respect them, without ignoring their possible dark or negative side. And this is a fluid medium and perhaps a principal way of granting them a visible dignity, since ethics and aesthetics need and enhance each other.

Salgado's photographic work represents an exceptional case of mission accomplished. After his death, his spirit and his images will live on in traveling exhibitions and magnificent books, such as Genesis and Amazonia, as well as in The Salt of the Earth, one of Wim Wenders's finest films, perhaps the best documentary by the author of Wings of Desire, in this case co-directed with Juliano Ribeiro Salgado in 2014. In this film, we see that the scope of Salgado's work is not only documentary and photographic, but also, and above all, humanistic and ecological.

We will remember his black and white images of men carrying coffin-like timbers over a sea of ​​clouds, or of miners exploited in a kind of earthly hell, under the sway of the greedy gold rush, or those images of anonymous, poorly chronicled exoduses, with unarmed people fleeing war and misery. But also Edenic images, like that house of leaves in the Amazon rainforest, populated by naked women.