A friend of mine from Offstone directed me to this article on Sebastiao Salgado which speaks of the great Magnum photographer's move from socio-human photography to apparently nature photography. More than a simple shift, it analyzes deeply Salgado's despairs and hopes for planet Earth.

Quote ...

Simon Hattenstone
Saturday September 11, 2004
The Guardian


Sebasti?o Salgado is talking about the marine iguanas with which he spent three months, and he can barely contain himself. They are giant lizards, or tiny dinosaurs, with claws like diamant? gloves. "Oh boy!" he says. "They were so incredible, and they're completely different from one island to another, and some places there are thousands of them, and when you see these guys, it probably took them hundreds of thousands, millions, of years to be what they are: at first they were land iguanas, then they learned how to swim and how to dive and drink salt water, and they developed glands to eliminate salt water - incredibly sophisticated." He finally takes a breath. "Soooo sweet! There is a picture of one iguana embracing another."

Salgado has just spent three months in the Gal?pagos Islands, where Darwin visited 169 years ago and refined his theories of evolution. For Salgado, this is the first stop on an eight-year project called Genesis, all of which will appear in Guardian Weekend. He says it is the last project he will undertake on such a scale.

The great Brazilian photographer, now 60, has given his life to long-term projects - workers, landless peasants, children, migrants. He took his camera where few photographers bothered or dared to go. His most famous photographs are of the garimpeiros, the mud-soaked prospectors who climbed up and down open-cast Brazilian gold mines, hoping against hope to find a nugget of gold in their buckets of dirt. These pictures, taken in 1986, look like stills from a Cecil B DeMille movie of Dante's Inferno - an epic vision of hell with 50,000 extras and no stars.

His last major project was Migrations, or Exodus, as he prefers to call it. Over seven years, he took photographs of migrants from Africa, Asia and South America, many of whom had fled ethnic and religious conflict and genocidal regimes. Often his subjects, particularly the children, stare at the camera - strong, confrontational, giddy, laughing, heroic, even in their despair. Sometimes they are too ill or frightened to do so. Arthur Miller called Salgado's photographs an act of deep devotion.

But Exodus left him questioning his faith in humanity. He had seen so much man-made suffering. The idealist began to have his doubts about our essential goodness. "I was injured in my heart and my spirit. For me, it was terrible what I saw. I came away from this with incredible despair." He was desperate to find something that would restore faith.

Hence Genesis. Yes, we may already have destroyed 50% of the planet, but Salgado wants to show us what we have left, and what we stand to lose if we don't take care. "In the end, the only heritage we have is our planet, and I have decided to go to the most pristine places on the planet and photograph them in the most honest way I know, with my point of view, and of course it is in black and white, because it is the only thing I know how to do. I want to see if I can put a kind of virginity in these pictures, if you can say that, and to show 100% respect to nature and the animals."

Salgado was given permission by the National Park of the Gal?pagos and the Darwin Foundation to go anywhere on the islands. Although tourism is allowed and fishing permitted in the surrounding waters, both are heavily regulated. He hired a boat and spent most of the time with only the birds and animals for company. After a lifetime photographing humans, it was a radical departure. In these pictures, you can almost hear the silence, and feel the heat rising from the lava.
His work has always been about identity and belonging (or not belonging).

Salgado is a half-Jewish Portuguese Lithuanian Brazilian, and himself a migrant. He was born in a rural community in Brazil, the sixth child of a cattle rancher, moved to S?o Paulo, where he studied to become an economist, and finally fled to Paris in 1969 to escape Brazil's military dictatorship. He did a PhD in economics, then worked as an economist for the International Coffee Organisation. After decades away, he is now back in Brazil.

He was almost 30 when he took up photography. He started playing around with his wife's camera on a trip to Africa in 1973. That was that - he decided to change careers. He was invited to join Magnum in 1979. Now he has his own agency, Amazonas Images.

His work is fearlessly political - life is political, so of course photography will be, too. He has never shied away from bullets or death. Some of Salgado's most haunting photographs document a demonstration by landless peasants in 1996 that resulted in the police killing 19 protesters. Other pictures belonging to the same series show 12,000 marchers breaking open the paddock to a vast estate and reclaiming the land from an absentee landlord.

Genesis is also about land and belonging - this time, to the planet. It seems ironic that he has begun Genesis on the Gal?pagos. After all, it is on this archipelago off the coast of Ecuador that Darwin's work pretty much did for creationism. I ask him if he has belatedly found religion. "No," he says. "I'm not a religious person. The language of photography is symbolic." As is the title.

His own spiritual regeneration has been aided by another long-term project, the Instituto Terra. Back home in Brazil, Salgado has spent 13 years rebuilding a rainforest where his father's cattle used to graze. "All the birds are coming back, the river is flowing again, the environment is working, and all this has made such a difference to my relationship with nature. My life has completely changed," he says. Sometimes friends visit him and are shocked by what they see - the snakes and scorpions and crocodiles. "We have become so far away from our planet. We see nature as something that has to be tamed or eradicated. We think we are superior beings, completely rational. And, my God, the next generation, what kind of planet are we leaving them?"

His work has often been called cinematic, and perhaps following Exodus with Genesis can be seen as another modern-day movie convention - the prequel. This is the world before we conquered it. Some of the pictures of the iguanas and the tortoises look as if they could have been conjured up by the props department for an Ed Wood B-movie. The creatures look so prehistoric, so Jurassic Park, comically unreal. But Salgado's point is that they are real and they have survived where we haven't meddled.

His three months in the Gal?pagos were wonderful, he says. "I was in front of one giant tortoise I am 100% sure was there when Darwin came 170 years ago. And as I photographed this giant tortoise, it looked at me with the experience and authority of 200 years. Oh boy! What a privilege. It gave me so much pleasure to be alone with these animals, just looking at them. They - the cormorants and iguanas and sea lions - allowed me to participate in their space, and that is something fantastic."

He talks with awe of the resilience of the green sea turtles, the albatrosses that show such kindness to their life companions, and the sea lions so curious and affectionate that they lie down next to you, their body touching yours. He has already visited gorillas in Africa for the second stage of his project, and is about to spend time with whales in Argentina. I tell him that there seems to be so much hope in this project and he is pleased. "This is the point for me, that there is a hope. So many times I've photographed stories that show the degradation of the planet. I had one idea to go and photograph the factories that were polluting, and to see all the deposits of garbage. But, in the end, I thought the only way to give us an incentive, to bring hope, is to show the pictures of the pristine planet - to see the innocence. And then we can understand what we must preserve."

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I arrived in Jakarta on 8 September for a routine business visit that was to have lasted barely 48 hours but left only after 4 days.

Wednesday 8 September saw me and my colleague Ek Meng, moving around town meeting clients and we had lunch at the Grand Melia hotel about a block away from the Australian Embassy in Jakarta. Barely 24 hours later, terrorists ignited a suicide bomb outside the embassy that killed 9 Indonesians.

I was 500km away on the island of Sumatra in a town called Lampung at that time with my own set of problems. Local police arrested my colleague and myself on charges of passport violation and trumped charges of capital control violations.

We were arrested at 1.45pm on 10 September and were not released until 8.30pm on 11 September..... ironic that it was almost to the hour of the 3rd anniversary of 9/11 in NY.

We slept, or rather napped, a grand total of 2-3 hours during this time. There was no bodily damage but the mind games played were exhausting. Without eating anything but surviving on water, my little pack of Fisherman's Friend candy nourished the two of us for many hours.

Not that we were deprived of food, it was available. But the horrific toilet conditions at the station were to be avoided at ALL costs. A pee run that normally takes me a leisurely 2-3 minutes was executed within 20 seconds (that's how long I can hold my breath)

In my cell, measuring 3m by 4m, sat 7 other inmates. There were a few names I remembered........ Mustiq who was shot in both knees for fleeing the scene of a traffic accident........Johnnie, arrested for smoking marijuana, Iqbal, who was serving 50 days in jail for theft.

They were generally kind towards me asking me a load of questions as I was the only one in the cell clad in full office attire complete with cuff links and tie.

The cops made me leave my socks and shoes outside the cell ($200 German made Lloyds wingtips) which was a HUGE mistake on my part for not protesting hard enough. My bladder needed releasing badly and the cell toilet was a mess of misfired urine puddles and a few heaps of human fecces with. With BARE feet, and rolled up pants, I tipped toed in and executed the most disgusting, gut wrenching piss of my entire life.

Without toilet paper or cardboard to wipe my feet dry, the soles of my feet stayed contaminated for the next 18 hours until we got out of the station. I'd contemplated using my shirt but decided to keep it south on my soles.

We managed to get our first call out the next morning. After the ransom was paid we were released at 8.30pm on Friday night. I was honored that no less than Tomy Winata's people saved us. He is the head of one of Indonesia's most powerful business groups. The National Chief of Police in Jakarta was getting his fair share of pressures over the bombing at the Australian embassy a day earlier and had considered our rescue as extremely unimportant. It was only through God's grace that Tomy and my other clients applied enough pressure to secure our release.

First thing I did when we got out was not to eat but to have my damned feet washed.

A car picked us up on the stroke of midnight at the rendevous location, the ITT Sheraton hotel. Thus began another odessy through the night as we drove 2 hours out of town to the southern tip of Sumatra to the ferry terminal. The car was loaded up on to the ferry and it was another 2 hours crossing the straits before arriving on the main island of Java. The last leg involved a final 2 hour drive from the ferry arrival port to the capital city of Jakarta.

Arriving in Jakarta, we headed straight for the Soekarno Hatta International Airport to get out of town as fast as we could. Of course by then, the airport was filled with tourists and businesspeople all wanting to leave Indonesia after the attack on the embassy. All flights were packed solid, including First Class. We managed to only get onto the evening flights.

That evening at the airport, I boarded a packed jumbo and left Jakarta. I arrived in Singapore at 1am and only then did I appreciate living in a country that had clean toilets and everything ran in a dream-like efficiency.

I will be back in Indonesia..... the ordeal taught me lessons, not only in doing business the proper protected way but more importantly, it taught me lessons in human nature (my own and my tormentors'), greed and self-confidence. I will return stronger and wiser.

Compared to the deaths and destruction at the Australian embassy and at the JW Marriott earlier , my suffering was short. I pray for the souls of these innocent victims of a struggle that will take another generation to understand.

End