When he goes in search of his visions, a photographer is “a lonely cowboy”, Sebastião Salgado often repeats. He has everything he needs with him, he moves forward without looking back. A man on the move. Like migrants. He himself was a special kind of migrant, the political exile: when he fled to Paris, together with his wife Lélia Wanick, to escape prison in Brazil’s sick democracy.
But when he collects and puts those visions in order, then the photographer is a delegate of the community, he is the seer of the society in which he lives. The visual witness commissioned by the community to see where the eyes of the majority cannot reach. The reappearance, in a renewed form of his fundamental work on human migration, Exodus. Humanity on the moveat the Sea of Ravenna from 22 March to 2 June, is therefore also the demonstration, thirty years later, of how that gaze on the great movements of human masses in the world was necessary, as well as prophetic.
In 1993, when Sebastião Salgado undertook his journey in the wake of the infinite routes of planetary migrants, our country had not yet digested the shock of the biblical landing of the Albanians in Puglia, that lava flow of bodies that overflowed from the motor ship Vlora and that in the photographs of the time, the entire pier of the port of Bari was menacingly crowded to the point of hiding it. Six years later, when the Brazilian photographer concluded his collection and summarized it in that epochal book and exhibition, migration had now become a problem, or rather the most disruptive and nagging global problem. However, revisiting that exhibition now is not photodocumentary archaeology.
If anything, it is the premonition of an unstoppable phenomenon, despite the xenophobic presumption of the rulers of the destination nations: the condition, which becomes a tragedy the more it is denied, of a humanity that “votes with its feet”, which responds with the movement of bodies to predatory movement of colonialism of its new interpreters.
One hundred and eighty images, four continents, each with its particular brand: Africa emptied by the induced failure of its postcolonial redemption, Latin America of the despoliation of nature, Asia of the deadly mega-metropolitan magnets, Europe as a dreamed and barricaded. The exhibition now recovers its original title (in Italy it was On the Way), that is Exoduswith that Old Testament accent that runs through all of Salgado’s great investigations.
It was said that Salgado himself was a migrant, for different reasons: the economic affairs of his family of Brazilian farmers, his studies, his politics. And then a nomad by profession, with his projects always very long-term, from six to eight years; each spent an average of seven months travelling. A face that has become increasingly patriarchal over time (he has just turned eighty), Salgado has often divided the minds of critics, but it is difficult to deny him the title of Homeric narrator of contemporary times. “They say I’m an activist, it’s not true. I don’t belong to groups or parties, my photography is my ethics, my ideology. I photographed things that I thought were important or terrible or unknown enough to remain in the memory of humanity.” In Salgado’s journey, Exodus it is the second big stage. The first was The hand of man, a global story of humanity at work. That is: the biblical condemnation to fatigue, to the sweat of the brow. The work on migrants came later: and it was the expulsion from paradise on earth.
In the end, Genesis, a journey in search of the still uncontaminated places of the Earth. That is: life in the Garden of Eden. But the perfect trilogy, almost a Bible in reverse, had an epilogue: the return to man, to his fragility, to his dignity, in Amazon, elegy of life compatible with the planet. And in the end, Salgado also returned to his land, to the Brazil of his childhood and youth, where he resurrected the parched family farm by planting millions of trees.
Definitely a character with great ambitions, Salgado. “They say I’m a megalomaniac,” he says, “it’s not my fault, I was born in an immense country.”
