« A frontal conversation with light » – Liberation
« »Sebastião Salgadohe was a very great friend. We are all very very moved. We have shared thirty years of common life. When I left Paris Match, It was the first photographer who phoned me, I will not forget it and he said to me: “So what are we doing together?” Well we did Polka ! So much for a dear friend. Then he was a huge photographer. The first time I saw him Match, He arrived with his wife, he was in a heavy depression. He had known the worst in Rwanda. He had almost died there, he stayed there for several weeks, he could not stop photographing the dead. His images made him sick.
“He wanted to photograph the beauty of the world. He said: « We show the wound of the earth but I want to show the beauty of the world to say that that’s what you have to save. » Me skeptical, I replied: “Are you not going to become a landscaper all the same?” He wanted to photograph the Amazon, isolated animals and human beings, happy near their land, far from the tumult. I had a journalist reflex because I thought this project was going to be boring. Because for me, Salgado, it was man’s hand, Manual work brutality or Exodus, The heartbreaking human migrations. He knew how to show the destruction and misery as anyone, so the beauty of the world? He wanted to go to Galápagos and I laughed: “Are you not going to go to photograph turtles?”
“His project was ambitious, he provided eight years of work. Finally, Sebastião Salgado designed the biggest photography exhibitions of all time, he broke the records of the legendary exhibition The Family of Manthe most seen photo exhibition in the world.
« He’s a man reliable and committed to human and environmental causes. He did not understand that he is criticized, that he is accused of aesthetizing misery. He is a perfectionist in his black and white prints, with such deep blacks. He never cheated. Would we blame Victor Hugo for writing well? « » « How can I blame me for having beautiful lights? ” he said. At the Sulawesi, I saw him photograph, he is in a frontal conversation with light, it’s beautiful. Of course, he has an aesthetic, that’s what an artist is asking for. But aestheticization? It meant that he was suspected of manipulation: he suffered from it and then it happened, he had such recognition then …
“He was also a fantastic storyteller who knew how to capture his audience. I tried to follow him once in the Amazon but it was so difficult to prepare physically. Sebastião Salgado has shown that long -term report had a meaning; He is a benchmark by his perseverance and the strength of his work. ”
