LAPSE magazine, issue #1

Page 1

LAPSE Photojournalist Monthly Issue No. 1 Dec. 3, 2014

Exhibiting the Documentary Photographic works of

Sebasti達o Salgado & Pieter Hugo


LAPSE

Sea Lions, South Georgia Island, 2009, a photo taken by Sebastia천 Salgado.

Untitled Photo, Cape Town, Johannesburg, Africa, 2005. Photo taken by Pieter Hugo.


LAPSE

Project Description LAPSE magazine was designed by Alex Womack as a final project at the University of Kansas in Fall 2014. This project entails for students to create a magazine using not only work from two photographers but various typographical techniques that will create invitation and dynamic to a final 24 magazine spreads. Overall magazine must be consistent yet provide a variation in design between both of the photographer articles. The grid is a very important aspect of this project as well and determines how type is arranged on the page as well as the photos that are paired with the text. This magazines serves the purpose as an exhibition for the works of Sebastiao Salgado and Pieter Hugo which paired together give us a clearer depiction of various overseen events over the course of history that were only captured through the camera lenses of these great photographers.

3


LAPSE


LAPSE

5


LAPSE

Pieter Hugo

Photography, a Collective and Personal Narrative 1976–Present

ieter Hugo was born in the year 1976 in Johannesburg, Africa is a photographic artist living in Cape Town. Major museum solo exhibitions have taken place at The Hague Museum of Photography, Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, Ludwig Museum in Budapest, Fotografiska in Stockholm, MAXXI in Rome and the Institute of Modern Art Brisbane, among others. Hugo has participated in numerous group exhibitions at institutions including Tate Modern, the Folkwang Museum, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, and the São Paulo Bienal. His work is represented in prominent public and private collections, among them the Museum of Modern Art, V&A Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, J Paul Getty Museum, Walther Collection, Deutsche Börse Group, Folkwang Museum and Huis Marseille. Hugo received the Discovery Award at the Rencontres d’Arles Festival and the KLM Paul Huf Award in 2008, the Seydou Keita Award at the Rencontres de Bamako African Photography Biennial in 2011, and was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2012. Hugo is a South African photographer who primarily works in portraiture and whose work engages with both documentary and art traditions with a focus on African communities. Hugo lives in Cape Town. Hugo travels extensively to photograph Malochai Dorman and marginalized or unusual groups of people: honey gatherers in Ghana, Nigerian gang members who bring hyenas or baboons on their rounds to collect debts, boy scouts in Liberia, taxi washers in Durban, judges in Botswana. Hugo’s first major photo collection Looking

Aside’ consisted of a collection of portraits of people “whose appearance makes us look aside”, his subjects including the blind, people with albinism, the aged, his family and himself. Each man, woman and child poses in a sterile studio setting, under crisp light against a blank background. Explaining his interest in the marginal he has said, “My homeland is Africa, but I’m white. I feel African, whatever that means, but if you ask anyone in South Africa if I’m African, they will almost certainly say no. I don’t fit into the social topography of my country and that certainly fuelled why I became a photographer.” This was followed by “RWANDA 2004: VESTIGES OF A GENOCIDE” which the Rwanda Genocide Institute describes as offering “a forensic view of some of the sites of mass execution and graves that stand as lingering memorials to the many thousands of people slaughtered.”His most recognized work is the series called ‘The Hyena & Other Men’ and which was published as a monograph. It has received a great deal of attention. Hugo was also working on a series of photographs called ‘Messina/Mussina’ that were taken in the town of Musina on the border between Zimbabwe and South Africa and which was published as a monograph after Colors magazine asked Hugo to work on an AIDS story. This was followed by a return to Nigeria with ‘Nollywood’, which consists of pictures of the Nigerian film industry. ‘Permanent Error’ followed in 2011 where Hugo photographed the people and landscape of an expansive dump of obsolete technology in Ghana. Sean O’Toole writes ‘if Nollywood was playfully over-the-

top, a smart riposte to accusations of freakishness and racism levelled at his photography..., Permanent Error marks Hugo’s return to a less self-reflexive mode of practice.’ In 2011 Hugo collaborated with Michael Cleary and co-directed the video of South African producer/ DJ Spoek Mathambo’s cover version of Joy Division’s She’s Lost Control, the fourth single from his album Mshini Wam.Commissioned by Italian luxury label Bottega Veneta, Hugo photographed models Amanda Murphy and Mark Cox for the brand’s spring/summer 2014 campaign, with the images shot in a wood in New Jersey.In the Spring of 2014, Hugo was commissioned by Creative Court to go to Rwanda and capture stories of forgiveness as a part of Creative Court’s project Rwanda 20 Years: Portraits of Forgiveness The project was displayed in The Hague in the Atrium of The Hague City Hall for the 20th commemoration of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. A selection of the photos have also been displayed in New York. The exhibition titled “Post-Conflict” which was curated by Bradley McCallum, Artist in Residence for the Coalition for the International Criminal Court. Hugo won first prize in the Portraits section of the World Press Photo 2005 for a portrait of a man with a hyena. In 2007, Hugo received the Standard Bank Young Artist Award 07. While receiving a lot of ‘critical bouquets’, Hugo has also been accused of sensationalising and exploiting the exotic “other”. Hugo responds, “My intentions are in no way malignant, yet somehow people pick it up in that way. I’ve travelled through Africa, I know it, but at the same time I’m not really part of it... I can’t claim to have an authentic voice, but I can claim to have an honest one.”


LAPSE

My intentions are in no way malignant... yet somehow people pick it up in that way. I’ve traveled through Africa, I know it, but at the same time I’m not really part of it… I can’t claim to have an authentic voice, but I can claim to have an honest one.

73


LAPSE

Shaun Oliver, Cape Town, 2011

Figures and Fictions co-curator Tamar Garb is ambivalent about the ethical questions his work often poses and responds to: “Some people feel his work perpetuates an image of Africa as a space of abject poverty and of theatrical display for a Western art market – but he genuinely engages with the places he works in and questions the means of his own representation.” In “The Photography of Pieter Hugo” in Aperture Magazine, Bronwyn Law-Viljoen says: “The novelist John Fowlesobserves, in an essay on The French Lieutenant’s Woman, that ‘All human modes of description (photographic, mathematical…) are metaphorical. Even the most precise scientific description of an object or a movement is a tissue of metaphors.’ Hugo understands that a photographic metaphor, a way of describing something through reference to something else, is created as much by the elements inside the frame of the image itself as by the carefully chosen distance, what I have called the critical zone, from the photographer’s lens to his subject. It is within this zone that Hugo

Samuel Nkosomzi, Cape Town, 2007

maneuvers through the muddy waters of political engagement, documentary responsibility, and the relationship of these to his own aesthetic.” Pieter Hugo’s “Kin” is the photographer’s examination of his native South Africa in which he focuses on his country from both a collective and personal narrative. “Kin” is highly ambitious: Hugo focuses on issues of race, class, sexuality, and politics while also turning the camera on himself, questioning his place in a society he says is aHugo said he has mixed feelings about being in South Africa and says the series is an engagement with the South African colonial experiment’s failures. “Some of the images in this series were made because they felt particularly important to the larger narrative, such as the portraits of my family and the people who raised us. … I would travel to places in South Africa to which I have a personal historical affiliation. Once there I would let intuition guide me while making images and try to find gestural images that allude to these colliding historical narratives.” “fractured, schizophrenic, wounded, and problematic place.”

Hugo said he has mixed feelings about being in South Africa and says the series is an engagement with the South African colonial experiment’s failures. “All space and history in South Africa is contested,” Hugo wrote via email. “Some of the images in this series were made because they felt particularly important to the larger narrative, such as the portraits of my family and the people who raised us. … I would travel to places in South Africa to which I have a personal historical affiliation. Once there I would let intuition guide me while making images and try to find gestural images that allude to these colliding historical narratives.” Currently on view at Yossi Milo Gallery in New York through Oct. 19, the series includes a wide range of subjects seen through landscapes, still life, and portraiture, including those of South African residents, people who have worked for Hugo’s family, and a couple who were part of Africa’s first traditional gay wedding. LoHugo said many of the ideas for the subjects emerged while he was working on the series for eight years, and his feelings about his country shifted throughout the elongated process.


LAPSE Photography, a Collective and Personal Narrative

Loyiso Mayga, Wandise Ngcama, Lunga White, Luyanda Mzantsi, Khungsile Mdolo after their initiation ceremony, Mthatha, 2008.

All space and history in South Africa is contested.

Mandy Matlala, Langaville, Ekurhuleni, 2012

93


LAPSE

Determining a hyena’s gender can be a challenge. Females of the species are not only larger and more aggressive than males, but they also have an elongated clitoris that closely resembles a penis in size, shape and erectile ability. Lacking an external vagina, females urinate, mate, and give birth through this pseudo-penis, an anatomical anomaly that has fueled the popular misconception that hyenas are hermaphrodites. Captivation does little to mitigate the hyena’s bizarre appearance. Historically, the animals have seldom been domesticated and seem only precariously so in Hugo’s photographs. The hyenas are bound with woven muzzles attached to chains that seem better suited to anchoring medium-sized boats than to leashing an animal. Some of the men are depicted with sticks or clubs, presumably as a counter-measure if the animal were to slip, for a moment, back into the wild. At the same time, the possibility of barely suppressed animal violence erupting is what makes the hyena a compelling spectacle—or an effective partner in crime. Hyenas have played a role in human culture since the ancient Egyptians hunted them for food, but they have also long been a source of ambivalence within anthropocentric models of the natural world. We tend to overlay our own value systems onto animal behavior, allowing us to understand black labs as loyal friends and marginalize less adorable animals such as the hyena. Because they scavenge the leftovers of “noble hunters” like lions, hyenas have been portrayed in Western literature as timid or cowardly. Medieval besti-

Abdullahi Mohammed with Mainasara-Ogere-Remo, Nigeria, 2007.

aries commonly use images of hyenas mating to warn against homosexuality, likely because of the female’s bizarre genitalia. In Edmund Spenser’s epic poem Faerie Queene, hyenas are deceitful, lustful beasts conjured by witches. Ernest Hemingway best summarizes the historical prejudices against the hyena in a passage from Green Hills of Africa, in which he describes gleefully killing the animals: “[T]he hyena, hermaphroditic self-eating devourer of the dead, trailer of calving cows, ham-stringer, potential biter-off of your face at night while you slept, sad yowler, camp-follower, stinking, fowl, with jaws that crack the bones that the lion leaves, belly dragging, loping away on the brown plain, looking back, mongrel dog-smart in the face...” (Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa , Simon and Schuster, 1996 In fact, hyenas can be prolific, fearsome hunters in the wild and display intense loyalty to the pack. Yet, recovering an idealized image of the proud hyena may be as illusory a proposition as finding in the animal a “friend.” Through their interactions with humans, the hyenas in Hugo’s photographs have become the debased scavengers of cultural imagination. Wholly dependent upon the itinerant group, they move from town to town in an existence that guarantees little food. The hyena’s nomadic hunting and scavenging may play a central role in the ecosystem of the Serengeti, but photographed on the outskirts of Abudja, their wandering symbolically conjures the human condition of homelessness and exile. The hyenas have clearly been displaced, perhaps cruelly, into a human social framework where they function purely as a spectacle of displace-

ment. Still, Hugo’s work complicates appeals to animal rights. These photographs present the hyena’s captivity as a double-sided relationship in which the humans may be just as displaced as their non-human counterparts.

Myths surrounded them. ... A group of men, a little girl, three hyenas, four monkeys and a few rock pythons. It turned out that they were a group of itinerant minstrels, performers who used the animals to entertain crowds and sell traditional medicines. The animal handlers were all related to each other and were practising a tradition passed down from generation to generation.


LAPSE Photography, a Collective and Personal Narrative

Alhaji Hassan with AjascoOgere-Remo, Nigeria, 2007.

The Hyena men of Abuja, Nigeria, 2005.

11 3


LAPSE

In 2004-05, for his project Looking Aside, Hugo made portraits of people we usually like to turn away from. The works are studio portraits resembling monumental passport photographs of the elderly, the blind, and albinos, the “white-skinned blacks” who are frequently discriminated against and often persecuted in Africa. One of the images in the series is a picture of the photographer himself, because Hugo regards himself as an outsider, as well: “My homeland is Africa, but I’m white,” he says. “I feel African, whatever that means, but if you ask anyone in South Africa if I’m African, they will almost certainly say no. I don’t fit into the social topography of my country and that certainly fuelled why I became a photographer.” Following a brief time as a photojournalist, Hugo realized that as a six-foot-tall white man, he brings a presence into many situations that makes it impossible to remain in the background as a “neutral observer.” At the same time, the act of photographing and the power structures it implies seem more and more questionable to him. To this day, he ponders the broken relationship to photography and the medium’s intrinsic mechanisms. He frequently states that his mistrust of photography goes deep. During the Apartheid era, the medium primarily served to document South African society. Its goal seemed clearly defined: “Photographers usually sat within a liberal camp

and used their skills to articulate the political reality-anything less was thought frivolous,” says Hugo, who graduated from HIGH SCHOOL in 1994, the year the first democratic elections took place in South Africa. Following the end of white rule, the era of clear fronts was over. “Now we’re in a completely different era, a different place. The complexities have become far more nuanced.” Photographers react to this situation and increasingly depart from a “culture of realism” to find new ways to investigate themes such as politics, race, class, and gender roles. The wide diversity of photography in South Africa today can also be seen this year in the comprehensive show Figures and Fictions at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Along with Hugo, Guy Tillim, Sabelo Mlangeni, and Roelof Van Wyk are also in the exhibition, as well as Zwelethu Mthethwa, who has an entire floor in the Deutsche Bank Towers in Frankfurt dedicated to his work.

evident that blacks can also wear the insignia of power? Why, in a former British protectorate, is authority still expressed through this kind of “uniform”? Do the judges seem especially dignified in their roles, or merely in costume? Hugo’s predilection for the surreal can be seen in his images of eccentrically costumed fans of the Orlando Pirates Football Club or the works from his series Nollywood, which are part of the Deutsche Bank Collection. These portraits celebrate a film industry that’s hardly known outside Africa and the African diaspora-despite the fact that it surpasses Hollywood in terms of the number of films produced. Only India produces more films than Nigeria. As video CDs and DVDs, they’re sold in the tens of thousands at a low price, which carries them to Africa’s remotest regions.

For Hugo, a departure from classical reporting in favor of working with middleand large-format cameras was a decisive step on the path to his artistic projects. One of his key themes was clothing and costume: his portraits of black judges from Botswana in traditional British official garb-the red robes and white wigs-raise numerous questions, particularly in the mind of the Western viewer. How long will it take until it’s completely self-

At a traffic intersection, Johannesburg, 2011


LAPSE Photography, a Collective and Personal Narrative

Untitled, Cape Town, Johannesburg, Africa, 2011.

A beginning Photographer hopes to learn to use the medium to describe the truth. The intelligent journeyman has learned that there is not enough film to do that.

Aissah Salifu, Agbogbloshie Market, Accra, Ghana, 2010.

13 3


LAPSE


LAPSE

Sebastião Salgado

1944–Present ebastião Salgado is an award-winning a Brazilian photographer who is known for his arresting documentation of communities around the world as well as his charity. He has created large bodies of work that can be somewhat contraversial.

he soon decided to forego economics to begin a career as a photojournalist. He worked as a freelancer for several major photographic agencies from 1974 through ‘94, traveling around the world to document news events. His work has appeared in newspapers and magazines within numerous countries.

Sebastião Salgado was born on February 8, 1944, in Aimorés, Brazil. After an early career as an economist, he decided to become a photographer in the 1970s. Salgado has earned fame for his stark photos of people coping with the effects of poverty, famine, industrialization and political oppression. He has published several books and has received awards for his socially conscious photojournalism. The son of a cattle rancher, he grew up on a farm with his seven sisters.

Salgado’s photography has often focused on the effects of hardship, poverty and oppression on people of various cultures, and with the effects of industrialization on the natural landscape. His work can be recocgniInspired by the photojournalism of Lewis Hine, W. Eugene Smith and Walker Evans, Salgado has tackled subjects like famine, poverty and social inequality in black-and-white photos that are unsparing yet often beautiful.In 1977, Salgado began to photograph the rural peasants of Latin America; this series was published in 1986 as his first book, Other Americas. Around this time, he began to work with the humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders on a project documenting the effects of famine in Africa through vivid photography. After his field work was finished he published two books of these photographs, titled Sahel: Man in Distress and Sahel: The End of the Road, and donated proceeds from the sales to Doctors Without Borders.

Salgado attended school first in Aimorés and then in the coastal city of Vitoria. After completing his college education, he earned a master’s degree in economics from the University of São Paulo. He began to study for a doctorate in economics at the University of Paris, but moved to London to work as an economist for the International Coffee Organization. He returned to Paris in 1973. Salgado became interested in photography when he was 26 years old, and

From 1986 to ‘92, Salgado traveled to 23 countries to visit manual laborers in large-scale industrial and agricultural sites, including oil fields and commercial fisheries. This led to his 1993 book workers, which revealed the humanity of these individuals even as they toiled under harsh conditions. His series Migrations, begun in 1993, focused on large groups of people who have immigrated or relocated under duress, especially from rural areas to cities. For Genesis, a project begun in 2004 and published in 2013, Salgado turned his attention back to the landscape and wildlife, traveling to the most remote parts of the globe to photograph places where nature remains untouched by human development. Salgado has received numerous awards for his photojournalism and has twice been named Photographer of the Year. Salgado is a goodwill ambassador for UNICEF and an honorary member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences. He and his wife, Lélia, an architect and urban planner, who gave Sebastiao his first Liece camera, were married in 1967. Together they founded the photographic agency Amazonas Images that represents Salgado’s work. They have also worked together on the restoration of Brazilian rainforests, and they co-founded an environmental education center called Instituto Terra in 1998.

The photos to the right of elephants were taken in Kafue National Park, Zambia, Africa by Salgado in the year 2010.

15


LAPSE

ARCTIC CIRCLE

Eight years ago, at the age of 60, Salgado began his most challenging and ambitious artistic project. The Brazilian photographer, famous for his fine art portraits of migrant communities and manual workers, recently completed a photo essay entitled “Exodus” a project about refugee camps and people fleeing genocide. His most recent work, Genesis, strives to document the world’s most pristine, untouched locations – areas removed from modern life. “This project is designed to reconnect us to how the world was before humanity altered it almost beyond recognition” explains Salgado. It is also meant to expose viewers to a sense of hope associated with the world’s natural beauty – a more optimistic take on humanity in response than his previous subject matter. When asked what the 30 trips comprising the work of Genesis taught him, he said, “Many things. The first truth is, I have been told a lie throughout my life. We were told we were the only rational species. Each species has its own rationality, the same as the trees, the plants: they all have incredible behavior, incredible rationality, incredible intelligence.” His time with the Nenets marked the last leg of his tour. Prior subjects included the giant tortoises and marine iguanas of the Galápagos Islands, the mountain gorillas of Rwanda, the Indigenous peoples of the southern Amazon, and the brown bears of the Kamchatka peninsula. When asked about his experiences with the

Nenets people he says in excitement, “There is so much love in their lives: wife to husband, husband to wife, for their children. Everything around them makes their life very rich, and they tell each other nice stories.” Crossing the Ob river to enter the Arctic Circle, travelling some 50km (31 miles) over ice. The way of life of the Nenets of the Siberian Arctic is inseparable from the reindeer. Every spring, they move enormous herds of reindeer from winter pastures on the Russian mainland, travelling more than 1,000km (620 miles) north to summer pastures in the Arctic Circle. This ritual is so old that it seems unclear whether the Nenets follow the reindeer, or vice versa. The migration starts in mid-March in freezing temperatures and is immediately challenged by the need to cross the frozen Ob river. But the Nenets take this in their stride, bolstered by a regimented work ethic and a robust culture. They survived early Russian colonisation of Siberia and the dark years of the Soviet regime, but are now being exposed to the perils posed by development of oil and gas fields in the far north. The Nenets’ diet is based on reindeer meat and fish. Every three or four days, they kill a reindeer by strangling it. They then remove the entrails, drink the warm blood and eat the uncooked liver, kidneys and heart. The rest of the meat, easily preserved in the cold, is left on a sledge, along with fish caught in ice holes, these are to be consumed when necessary.

When temperatures fall sharply and fierce winds blow, the Nenets and their reindeer may spend several days in the same place until milder weather allows them to continue their migration. The photos (above, top left, and right) are of the Nenets of the Siberian Arctic, Russia taken in 2011.


LAPSE An Eye for Documentary Photography

17


LAPSE

SAHEL The photo on the right was taken by Salgado in Korem camp. Ethiopia in the year 1984. Below is an image of Kalema camp, west of Tigray. Ethiopia in the year 1985. In the image on the bottom of the page 7 is a refugee from Eritrea, carrying his dying son, arrives at Wad Sherifai camp. Sudan in the year 1985. At the top of the page 7 the is an image of Refugee, blinded by sandswtorms and eye infections in Mali in the year 1985.


LAPSE An Eye for Documentary Photography

In 1984 and 1985 this part of Africa underwent a drought of catastrophic magnitude, never known before. War was on in many regions, in Chad, in Ethiopia, and, because of the drought or using this natural phenomenon, war amplified the exodus and pushed the populations out of the villages in which they could have hoped to survive. Sebastião Salgado stayed for several months there to document and photograph the catastrophe in many countries such as Mali, Chad, Ethiopia, Sudan and Erythrea. He mainly worked with the teams of Médecins sans Frontières (French Doctors without Borders). These are images that were seen throughout the world and stirred up contraversy, published by the international press. The book Sahel, l’homme en détresse, published by Prisma Press in 1986, was sold to the profit of MSF in France. In 1988 another book, Sahel-El fin del camino, was published by Comunidad de Madrid, and sold to the benefit of Spanish MSF. Another book was published in 2004 by University of California Press in the USA, Sahel, The End of the Road. Sebastião Salgado began what would be a fifteen-month project of photographing the drought-stricken Sahel region of Africa in these helpless countries where approximately one million people died from extreme malnutrition and related causes. Working with the humanitarian organization doctors Without Borders, Salgado documented what he could of the enormous suffering and the great dignity of the refugees. This early work became a template for his future photographic projects about other afflicted people around the world. Since then, Salgado has again and again sought to give visual voice to those millions of human beings who, because of military conflict, poverty, famine, mass overpopulation, pestilence, extreme environmental degradation, and other forms of catastrophe, teeter on the edge of survival. Beautifully produced, with thoughtful supporting narratives by Orville Schell, Fred Ritchin, and Eduardo Galeano, this first U.S. edition brings some of Salgado’s earliest and most important work to an American audience for the first time. While traveling as an economist to Africa, he began photographing the people he encountered. Working entirely in a blackand-white format, Salgado highlights the larger meaning of what is happening to his subjects with an imagery that testifies to the fundamental dignity of all humanity while simultaneously protesting its violation by war, poverty, and other injustices. “The planet remains divided,” Salgado explains. “The first world in a crisis of excess, the third world in a crisis of need.” This disparity between the haves and the have-nots is the subtext of almost all of Salgado’s work.

19


LAPSE

BRAZIL

In 1986 Sebastião Salgado began a series of reportages on the theme of manual labor, throughout several different continents. This work was conceived to tell the story of an era. The images offer a visual archaeology of a time that history knows as the Industrial Revolution, a time when men and women work with their hands provided the cenavtral axis of the world. The highly industrialized world is racing ahead and stumbling over the future. In reality, this telescoping of time is the result of the work of people throughout the world, although in practice it may benefit few. The developed world produces only enough for those who can consume approximately one-fifth of all people. The remaining four-fifths, who could theoretically benefit substantially from surplus production, thier also no way of becoming consumers. The destiny of men and women is to create a new world, to reveal a new life, to remember that there exists a frontier for everything except dreams. In this way, they adapt, resist, believe, and survive. A wide selection of images Salgado has taken and documented 29 accomplished reportages is presented in the book Workers, published in 1993 in nine editions, accompagnied by an exhibition still touring throughout the world today. Quite a few of the photographic essays in the book “Workers” have been previously published in magazines, among them, the gold miners in Serra Pelada, Brazil. These publishings also include the oil well workers of Kuwait and workers building the Eurotunnel between

England and France. This in no way diminishes the new book, which, taken in its entirety, provides a global perspective of this often overlooked but deserving subject. Salgado’s book “Workers” also includes a fair representation of women laborers. The best series is of workers in India, on the Sandar Sarovar Dam and irrigation canal, and the Rajasthan Canal project. The pictures display an elegance and sense of pride; the women are hauling stone, dressed in beautiful saris and silver bracelets, part of their dowries. Their dress belies the difficulties and importance of their labors to the decades-long task of building both the dam and the canal, projects that, once completed, will forever change their way of life. The woman in this scene of inhumanity handle traditions in their own way. For example, if you have lived and worked in India you will know that for many workers misery is not material; for them, misery is to do with loneliness and rejection, with leading life isolated from the group, and not principally with hardship and poverty. Look how the women who dig the Rajasthan Canal and toil in the coal mines dress in saris, wear as much jewellery as they own and have fresh flowers plaited into their hair. If I celebrate that dignity and beauty nothing is wrong with that. These publications have helped the world to see this hardship for what it really is thanks to Salgado.

The top photo was taken of Miners Backs, Gold Mining, Serra Pelada, Brazil in the year 1986. The photo above is of a worker and a soldier in conflict.The main photo photo on page 9 were taken in the year 1986 while Salgado was in Brazil documenting the hardships of these miners.


LAPSE An Eye for Documentary Photography

21 3


LAPSE

Untitled, Nigeria, 2007. Photo taken by Pieter Hugo.

Buffalo, Okavango Delta, Botswana, 2010. Photo taken by Sebastiao Salgado.


LAPSE

Colophon This magazine features the typefaces DIN (black and black italic), Archer (book and bold), and Gotham light (only on cover). The photographers whose works are featured in this magazine are of Pieter Hugo (1976-Present) and Sebastiao Salgado (1944-Present). The text was taken from several articles and sources such as, amazonasimages.com, pieterhugo.com, and yossimilo.com. This publication was created by Alex Womack for educational purposes only and is not meant to be reproduced.

23



Turn static files into dynamic content formats.

Create a flipbook
Issuu converts static files into: digital portfolios, online yearbooks, online catalogs, digital photo albums and more. Sign up and create your flipbook.