• +49_(0)6174_998 72 59
  • service@deSaive-deSign.de
  • +49_(0)6174_998 72 59
  • service@deSaive-deSign.de

Sebastião Salgado. Gold - Limited and signed edition

800.00 €
incl. VAT, plus delivery
In stock
Delivery time: 2 - 3 day(s)

Description

 

Sebastião Salgado. Gold - Limited and signed edition

For a decade, 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 gold rush is merely the stuff of legend, kept alive by a few happy memories, many pained regrets—and Sebastião Salgado’s photographs. 

This signed edition gathers the complete black-and-white portfolio in impeccable, grand-scale, museum-quality reproductions. 

Collector’s Edition (No. 101–1,100), each numbered and signed by Sebastião Salgado.

“Salgado’s photographs project an immediacy that makes them vividly contemporary. We know that the mine at Serra Pelada is now closed, yet the intense drama of the gold rush leaps out of these images.”

— Alan Riding

 

Sebastião Salgado. Gold
Sebastião Salgado, Lélia Wanick Salgado
Hardcover in clamshell box, 45 x 41 cm, 196 pages,
numbered and signed by Sebastião Salgado
Edition of 1,000

ISBN 978-3-8365-7650-5 (English)

 

When Sebastião Salgado was finally authorized to visit Serra Pelada in September 1986, having been blocked for six years by Brazil’s military authorities, he was ill-prepared to take in the extraordinary spectacle that awaited him on this remote hilltop on the edge of the Amazon rainforest.

Before him opened a vast hole, some 200 meters wide and deep, teeming with tens of thousands of barely-clothed men. Half of them carried sacks weighing up to 40 kilograms up wooden ladders, the others leaping down muddy slopes back into the cavernous maw. Their bodies and faces were the color of ochre, stained by the iron ore in the earth they had excavated.

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 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.