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A Different Light: The Photography of Sebastião Salgado

Parvati Nair , A Different Light: The Photography of Sebastiao Salgado. Durham, MD, and London: Duke University Press. 2011. 365 pp. ISBN 978-0-8223-5048-4.As surprising as it may initially be to learn that Parvati Nair's A Different Light is the first in-depth study of a world-renowned photographer such as Sebastiao Salgado, recognizing the gauntlet thrown down by such a task makes it considerably less so. For, as the author notes, the controversy and conflicting opinion surrounding Salgado's work encapsulates many unresolved tensions at the core of socially concerned photo-documentary practice. In fundamental terms these relate to our understandings of the role played by photojournalism and documentary and its unsettling relationship with the overlapping worlds of both art and commerce. Salgado's photographs become the contextual lens through which Nair frames the complex and challenging intersection between aesthetics, ethics, history and politics in documentary representation. Much of the criticism levelled at Salgado centres upon the unsettling marriage between beauty and suffering that permeates his dramatic black and white imagery, together with the frequently glaring socio-economic gap between represented subjects and their common audience. Rather than encourage sentimentality or voyeuristic pleasure, Nair argues that the stimulation of affect serves here to foster critical engagement and a sense of responsibility in the viewer. In this manner she suggests that Salgado's aesthetic approach to his subject matter is not a weakness as some critics maintain, but is in fact the crux of the work's political force.Nair first positions Salgado's work within a biographical framework that acknowledges the photographer's rural upbringing in Brazil, his training in economics, and his personal experience of displacement and political exile, together with his close working partnership with his wife Lelia. This serves to foster a fuller appreciation of both methodological and thematic trends in his work. Nair stresses the important role that Salgado's imagery performs in rendering visible the disenfranchised of the world as he traces the human consequences of industrialization and globalization around the turn of the millennium. Thus those experiencing drought, hunger or enforced migration cross the photographer's lens to materialize in human form before a more prosperous audience accustomed to encountering such people only as statistics. Chapter 1 traces a broadly chronological path through Salgado's principal photographic essays, illuminating his overarching preoccupations with difference, the phenomenon of dislocation accompanying modernization, and the increasing fragility of the relationship between humankind, the natural world and its resources. Each of the following four chapters explores his work in relation to the domains of aesthetics, history, ethics and politics respectively. While this approach involves retreading some ground with each new chapter, which might suggest that the book could have benefited from an alternative structure, such resistance to isolation testifies above all to the intricate way in which these elements are enmeshed in the documentary project. …