Sebastiao Salgado

Sebastiao Salgado and the HKDRT – Diving show

Friday, Dec  12^th seemed like it was one of those auspicious days on the Chinese calendar for a Brazilian underwater photographer .  The stars were aligned and we had both the presence of Sebastiao Salgado un a FCC lunch and the opening of the Hong Kong “Diver and resort travel expo”.  That must be a good start for a the weekend!

Sebastiao Salgado is, by a good margin, the best well known Brazilian photographer in the planet. And he is an economist, which is a great sign for me. He has shaken the world a few times with his blunt black and white photography that was mostly focused in social themes. Now, the 70-year old master has come forward with a book with a more ecological bias and he has done it again: the images are very sharp, his message is clear and as he said himself “photography breaks the language barrier, like music” so he is bound to acclaimed once more.

That does not seem to be enough, though. It is clear during his speech that he is still trying to increase his notoriety and the value of his work. Of course his presentation was remarkable but on a deeper layer, one can clearly notice the marketing undertone of everything on the speech. The details of how it is so hard to go to the locations, his loneliness in taking the picture, the idea of capturing only 1 second of light in 250 images taken in 1/250s each, the song chosen for the picture show and so on. None of that matters, though. His work speaks for itself. The photos are sublime, regardless of his old-style post processing techniques.

There was one thing, however, that annoyed me. In trying to praise his own work, he said “photography is dead, what we see now are just images, cell phone snapshots with no soul  on a digital screen. They will never be printed”. While I understand his reluctance to accept new technologies and agree that not every cell phone snapshot is a proper photo, I subscribe to the understanding of Brian Peterson that “the best camera is the one available” and there are a lot of excellent PHOTOS taken with the simplest of cameras. Ken Rockwell (http://www.kenrockwell.com/) is also a big advocate of images taken with phones and simple compact cameras. He actually has workshops in which you can only join if you have a b***s**t compact camera because he wants to focus on finding the right image instead of the camera settings. My wife has a friend who had quite a few pictures published at once in a magazine a few months back, all of them taken on an iphone. Seriously, if the pictures are good, why should it matter how they were taken? Or how they were post-processed?

Our disagreement did not stop me from getting a signed copy of his latest work, obviously!