Genesis. Slowness and Speed by Sebastião Salgado

Article from the column La foto sulla schiena, Art&Art, no. 63, April-May 2016

A photographer can naturally be inclined toward only one of two possible attitudes: the fast one or the slow one. The fast attitude places the photographer before things as though facing fireworks. Reality reveals itself to him in a flash, in the form of an explosion, and a moment later a myriad of fragments strike him, waiting to be captured, like sparks coming from every direction. The hunt for sparks is spasmodic and feverish, often because the seconds are numbered, other times because his attention is stretched along infinite directions. In this spatio-temporal pressure lies the pleasure of the fast attitude, which is what unites the street photographer, the documentarian, the photojournalist, and finally the paparazzo. What differentiates them is the breadth of their field of interest. The slow photographer, by contrast, aims at the astronomical magnification of a single aspect. For him, the hunt begins long before the shutter is pressed. Days, months, even years spent hunting a detail that, once captured, must be reviewed under certain conditions, carefully sifted, and finally distilled into a single photograph. In this distillation lies the pleasure of the slow attitude, which belongs to the landscape photographer, whether of nature or of the city, as well as, to a certain extent, to the photographer of large-scale sets (in the style of LaChapelle, so to speak). What sets the latter apart from the others is that, for him, the detail is recreated on a set that becomes a laboratory governed by even stricter rules, in a place and time set apart.

It is wasted time to try to establish which of the two paths is more fascinating, and it should be added that incursions of fast photographers into slow territory, and vice versa, are frequent. Consider, for instance, the many enchanting landscapes of the extremely fast McCurry, or the early documentary narratives of the extremely slow, young Kubrick. But when applied to Salgado’s work, the very idea of incursion seems unfitting, because the verticality of his commitment as artist and witness to the world, the discipline and ardor with which he has trained himself both in speed and in slowness, make him a master of both approaches.

Sebastião Salgado, Brazilian, born in 1944, is a photographer with particularly refined senses — all six of them — which have built, along his path, a life worthy of a novel. Initially heading toward a career as an economist, with a degree from São Paulo and a job already underway in Europe, he encountered photography and swiftly, without hesitation, transformed himself into a photojournalist. The political-economic training he possessed naturally came to serve his photographic inquiry, and this shift in perspective is the first clue to a personality little inclined to settle along the routes suggested by aptitude tests. Another clue: in 1994, after roughly fifteen years of collaboration, he left the Magnum Agency. Working for Magnum meant, then far more than today, being in Olympus. Leaving it, however imperfect it may actually be, requires considerable clarity of intent. When in 2003, after a period of deep crisis, of “sickness of the soul” as he himself called it, he decided to devote himself to a project of an entirely different nature from photojournalism — the “visual ode to the beauty and fragility of the Earth” that would become Genesis — more than a few doubts arose among his collaborators. “What, after everything you’ve done, you’re turning to landscape?” someone must have said, wrinkling their nose. Indeed, the prejudice still lingers today that landscape photography is somewhat of a genre for everyone, with little room for innovation, not very demanding, and above all too slow for the temperament and career of a photojournalist.

But, as was to be expected from the work of a man who is not outside the mold but, more precisely, devoid of one altogether, Genesis offered itself to the world with the force of a revealed secret. It doesn’t take long to realize that Salgado’s landscapes stand elsewhere compared to those of any other author; the difference lies not only in technique, nor only in the monumental scale of the effort, but in both together, accompanied by a disposition of spirit that does not merely observe but, further still, embraces, welcomes, and loves to the point of merging with everything before it. What Genesis’s images arouse is a feeling that precedes the coding of emotions, something more ancient than the idea of perfection or of panic. It is the silence of a mind in contemplation. Certainly an unprepared observer, faced with the image of a penguin diving from an iceberg into the ocean, might not resist the impulse to exclaim “how poetic!”, “how tender that penguin is!” — just as happens when admiring other, different but equally breathtaking photographs. But in this case, immediately afterward, they would be forced to recognize the utter inadequacy of their own emotion before the power of a new way of seeing. The absence of preconception and prejudice is total, just as there is no trace of any cultural coding regarding beauty. In the portraits, this absence of reference becomes downright rough and illegible to the Western observer. Those faces, through which feelings we have never given a name to shine through, often make identification impossible and leave one feeling uncomfortable, inadequate, as though seated on a scorching chair.

Genesis is testimony to a way of dwelling on Earth that is as new as it is ancient, of looking at it without falling into the rusty man-nature dialectic that, depending on the moods of the times, sees one or the other triumph. In Salgado, everything simply is. In stillness. Even the man, the woman, the child. A timeless stillness that recalls, if possible, that of a bow drawn taut the instant before the arrow is loosed, and certainly not that of cloth folded away in a drawer.

Every artist’s work is the result of their journey into certain deep and marshy places of existence, but some men manage to descend so far into pain that when, in rebound, they find themselves visiting the high places, nothing stands in the way of their joy.