Salgado’s Amazônia

Exhibition as Moral Imperative

A little while ago, Terrance passed along a tip from Alan Riding. Go see an exhibition at the Musée de la Musique at the Philharmonie de Paris. A photographic exhibition called ‘Amazônia,’ by the Brazilian documentary photographer and photojournalist, Sebastião Salgado, curated by his wife, the writer, film producer, and environmentalist, Lélia Wanick Salgado.

I thanked Alan for the lead, but I was a little worried. As I told him. I anticipated an exhibition celebrating the Amazon. But celebrations often come uncomfortably close (for me) to exploitation.

That had been my reaction last year to a photographic exhibition I saw at the Atelier des Lumières, called ‘The Last Sentinels’. (Figure 1) In that exhibition, the scenery was spectacular and the face and body adornments of the people depicted were beautiful. The immersive experience was a 40 minute travelogue featuring images projected on all four walls and the floor of the Atelier. (Figure 2). The images changed quickly but not simultaneously. So it would have been impossible to provide written or spoken information about where the images were from or who the images depicted. Unless you recognized a location or a headdress or a costume as it whirled by, all you could say with certainty was that people in furs were near a pole and people without clothes were near the equator. The program was divided into themes like Connection with Nature, Connections between Individuals, Wisdom and Energy. But again, the speed at which the images changed meant that if you looked away for a moment, a theme could change and you wouldn’t know it.

Figure 1. The Last Sentinels, Jimmy Nelson, Atelier des Lumières, Paris

Figure 2. The Last Sentinels, Jimmy Nelson, Atelier des Lumières, Paris

The English photographer Jimmy Nelson, on whose photographs the show was based, had embarked upon his ‘ethnological project’ in 2008. His aim was to photograph ‘indigenous peoples whose civilizations were on the verge of disappearing’. He traveled to five different continents, taking photographs that ‘highlighted the rites, songs and cultural traditions…’ of the peoples he met. Nelson wanted ‘to show these people living in harmony with and preserving nature.’ But as I watched one group gallop along on my left and another sail by on my right, I felt like a voyeur. Nelson surely was not but with neither text nor context to guide me, I was.

Immersed as I was in that immersive experience, I thought about Benjamin West’s 1770 painting, ‘The Death of General Wolfe' (Figure 3) in which a native American squats in an unsustainable position, silently watching a white general die. The Noble Savage, the stoic Indian Brave. It was a painting for a European audience, far away from the real thing, playing into the romantic tropes of the day. During the next century, the century of Westward Expansion, and in America, artists and photographers were called upon to show a very different native American, the Ignoble Savage. Depicted as the enemy, and the ‘other', it gave white Americans license to slaughter native Americans with the same abandon as they did the bison. The pendulum swings and Jimmy Nelson, like Benjamin West before him, showed indigenous peoples as heroes.

Figure 3. The Death of General Wolfe, Benjamin West, 1770 (Mohawk warrior to left of dying man)

So, it was with some trepidation that I walked into the Amazônia exhibition at the Philharmonie. (Figure 4) I needn’t have worried. This was a completely different experience. An experience that validated a place and the peoples who live in that place as well as the viewer whose level of intelligence was never questioned.

Amazônia is Sebastião Salgado’s fourth grand project, following Genesis, Workers and Migration. Their titles alone confirm Salgado’s life mission - to give voice to the unheard and make visible the unseen. For Amazônia, Salgado’s goal was to capture the natural diversity of the Brazilian rainforest and to document its inhabitants. For seven years, he traveled the Amazon, photographing the forest, the rivers, the mountains and the people who live in or on or near them.

And since this is a museum in a concert hall, an original score was commissioned for the exhibition. From the acclaimed French composer, Jean-Michel Jarre, best known for his new age electronic music. More about that in a moment.

The photographs of the forest are huge. And they are black and white. (Figure 5) Salgado works almost exclusively in black and white. Firstly because he mistrusts the color reproduction process and secondly, because color can be distracting. Maybe it makes hard subjects too easy to look at, too easy to look at without thinking about what you are seeing. The photos that Salgado took from a small watercraft offer us an intimate view of the forest. (Figure 6) With those photos, we are in the forest. The photos he took from the air, the bird’s eye views, (Figure 7) are the ones that most shockingly depict its devastation.

Salgado wants us to see the fragility of the Amazonian ecosystem and to show that where indigenous peoples live, the forest is almost unchanged, undamaged. More than 300 tribes, each with their own culture and their own language populate the Amazon. These are native peoples whose ancestors fled into the forest when the Spanish arrived over half a millennium ago. And they never left. (Figure 8) As Salgado explains, “Since the Brazilian Constitution of 1988, to protect them, it is forbidden to approach the tribes. Isolated groups who want to contact outsiders have the option of going out of the forest to do so, but the reverse is impossible. I have worked with communities that we have known for only twenty years, and even once with a group that had only been contacted for eighteen months.”

Salgado’s photographs of people - alone, in pairs or kinship or friendship groups, are accompanied by explanatory wall texts. We learn that the people photographed decided where they wanted to be depicted and how they wanted to be presented, clothed or unclothed, with or without hair, face or body adornments, etc.

I found many of the images very moving. One family group shows a man and his wife seated, surrounded by their three children. (Figure 9) They are all nude and each person looks directly at the camera. To me, the photo said, ‘this is who I am, this is who we are’.

Another photograph is of three young women. (Figure 10) The text explained that one of the women had subsequently died. She had ingested a poisonous substance that everyone in her tribe ingests, everyone knowing full well that it is lethal. The text explained attitudes towards and categories of death amongst these people. This woman’s death, because she was young, was considered a good death. The explanation didn’t come with judgement. It was straightforward. It was what it was.

As I looked at these photographs, I was reminded of a French documentary film by Thomas Balmès from 2010 called ‘Babies’. (Figure 11) The film follows four different couples from four parts of the world during a pregnancy (the first for two of the mothers). It shows how each mother (sometimes couple) navigates the pregnancy, the birth and the first years of their respective babies’ lives. The contrasts between the American (San Francisco) and Japanese (Toyko) mothers and their babies and the African and Mongolian mothers and their babies, couldn’t have been more obvious. (Figure 12) But there was no judgement, no agenda. It was up to the viewers to interpret the film as we wished. If I saw the American and Japanese couples as overweening (they were) well, that was on me. If I saw the value of just ‘being’ with a baby, again that was my interpretation.

Figure 12. Babies, 2010, Thomas Balmès, director

There is, of course, one major distinction. With ‘Babies,’ we are not encouraged to throw aside modern, Western medicine and embrace the natural ways of the African and Mongolian moms. But this exhibition does ask us to do something. Yes, we are presented with people as they wished to be seen, no judgements made. (Figure 13) But those of us in the over industrialized West are called to action. We are asked to make choices that will preserve the rainforest rather than continue along the path that is hastening its destruction.

There are also recorded testimonials which allow visitors to hear directly from people who live in the forest, in their own voices. One reviewer wrote that Salgado took the last of his photographs and recorded the last of the testimonials just before the Covid 19 epidemic. But one of the testimonials I heard suggests otherwise. A very brave man, I don’t know how else to put it, contended that Jair Bolsonaro, the president of Brazil, was intentionally bringing the virus to his people. To eliminate them. To make it easier to profit from the forest. Of course, the policy of deforestation did not begin with the current president of Brazil. Deforestation has been going on for a long time. But despite all we know now about climate change, the policy has not changed.

This is an exhibition with a moral (and political) agenda. It is an exhibition that expects people to think about the future of the Amazon and what we can do to halt its destruction.

The soundtrack which the Philharmonie de Paris commissioned for this exhibition (Figure 14) was composed by the highly acclaimed musician-composer Jean-Michel Jarre, (son of the well known composer, Maurice Jarre, among whose film scores were Dr. Zhivago and Lawrence of Arabia). Jean-Michel is a pioneer in electronic and new-age music. For this piece, he incorporated sounds from the rainforest - the wind rustling or whipping through the trees, water burbling along rivers and crashing down waterfalls. Birds singing to each other and animals calling out to one another.

Jarre wrote, “I approached the Amazon with respect, in a poetic and impressionistic way.… It carries a powerful image, both for Westerners and for Native Americans” He continued, “I wanted to avoid the ethnomusicological approach or background music. I … established a … toolbox (of) musical elements - orchestral or electronic - intended to recreate or evoke the timbre of natural sounds, to which are added sounds from the environment, and finally ethnic sources (voice, songs, instruments) from the sound archives of the Museum of Ethnography of Geneva (MEG). But since it isn’t ‘background’ music as Jarre notes, he also adhered to “…principles of orchestration (and) as in any symphony, the work has its moments of clarity (and) tension.”

This exhibition is really special. If you are in Paris, you can see it at the Philharmonie de Paris through October. It then travels to London, Manchester and Rome before crossing the Atlantic to Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Oh, one final note (good word choice, no?), it is now an award winning exhibition. On September 14, the annual Japanese Praemium Imperiale Prize (Nobel Prize for the Arts) awarded Sebastião Salgado a Painting prize for the photographs in this exhibition.

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