Fashion Sebastiao Salgado: Gold (Multilingual Edition) – Hardcover Book Books

After gold was discovered in one of its streams in 1979, Serra Pelada evoked the long-promised El Dorado as the world’s largest open-air gold mine, employing some 50,000 diggers in appalling conditions. Today, Brazil’s wildest gold rush is merely the stuff of legend, kept alive by a few happy memories, many pained regrets-and Sebastião Salgado’s photographs.

Color dominated the glossy pages of magazines when Salgado shot these images. Black and white was a risky path, but the Serra Pelada portfolio would mark a return to the grace of monochrome photography, following a tradition whose masters, from Edward Weston and Brassaï to Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson, had defined the early and mid-20th century. When Salgado’s images reached The New York Times Magazine, something extraordinary happened: there was complete silence. “In my entire career at The New York Times,” recalled photo editor Peter Howe, “I never saw editors react to any set of pictures as they did to Serra Pelada.”

Today, with photography absorbed by the art world and digital manipulation, Salgado’s portfolio holds a biblical quality and projects an immediacy that makes them vividly contemporary. The mine at Serra Pelada has been long closed, yet the intense drama of the gold rush leaps out of these images.

This book gathers Salgado’s complete Serra Pelada portfolio in museum-quality reproductions, accompanied by a foreword by the photographer and an essay by Alan Riding.

The photographer and author:
Sebastião Salgado began his career as a professional photographer in Paris in 1973 and subsequently worked with the photo agencies Sygma, Gamma, and Magnum Photos. In 1994 he and his wife Lélia Wanick Salgado created Amazonas Images, which exclusively handles his work. Salgado’s photographic projects have been featured in many exhibitions as well as books, including Sahel, L’Homme en détresse (1986), Other Americas (1986), Workers (1993), Terra (1997), Migrations (2000), The Children (2000), Africa (2007), Genesis (2013), The Scent of a Dream (2015), and Kuwait, A Desert on Fire (2016).

The editor and art director:
Lélia Wanick Salgado studied architecture and urban planning in Paris. Her interest in photography started in 1970. In the 1980s she began conceiving and designing the majority of Sebastião Salgado’s photography books and all the exhibitions of his work. Lélia Wanick Salgado has been the director of Amazonas Images since 1994.

The contributing author:
Alan Riding is a Brazilian-born British author and former long-time foreign correspondent for The New York Times. Having served as the paper’s bureau chief in Mexico, Brazil, and France as well as its European arts correspondent, he is now writing for the theatre. A resident of Paris like Sebastião Salgado, the two have been friends and collaborators since the early 1980s.