An overcrowded hospital with makeshift tents built on volcanic lava; two young landless peasants - a man and a woman - looking exhausted and staring forlornly, while the woman breastfeeds her baby; passers-by, among them a woman in a burkha, among the ruins of a ghost city.
Photographer Sebastião Salgado first published these images over ten years ago, as part of "Exodus", his volume of black and white pictures chronicling human migrations all over the world.
Yet if the credits to these images didn't reveal you that they were taken at a camp hospital in Zaire in 1994, in Brazil in 1996 and in Kabul among the remains of the once-prestigious Jade Maiwan Avenue in 1996, you would think the pictures had been taken in more recent years.
Not much has indeed changed since Salgado took the photographs: yes, some conflicts may have ended, and the economy may have improved in a few countries, but, at the same time, there are new wars and migrations.
That's why Salgado's works could be explored with fresh eyes with new exhibitions like the one curated by architect Lélia Wanick Salgado, the photographer's wife and collaborator, and opening this Saturday at Palazzo Buontalenti and at the Antico Palazzo dei Vescovi, in Pistoia, Italy (until 14th June 2020).
"Exodus. Travelling the Roads of Migration", features 180 images, chronicling modern history, but also casting the photographer's eye on all those ordinary men, women and children Salgado met in his travels.
Salgado began his career as a professional photographer in Paris in 1973 and worked with various photo agencies, including Sygma, Gamma and Magnum Photos. For over six years the Brazilian photographer documented mass migrations in 35 countries, looking at the physical and psychological pain of all those people leaving their countries and histories behind to find a new identity and life somewhere else, in promise lands that often revealed themselves as hostile.
Even though at times they may be pictured as they rest to take a short break from their journey or as they lie down on the ground, too exhausted to keep on walking, most times the subjects portrayed in "Exodus. Travelling the Roads of Migration" are moving, walking or on the run.
The photographs collected in this series strike a terrible difference with our days: we love selfies and prefer the pronouns "I" and "me" to "we" and "us". Salgado became instead part of his pictures by entering the lives of his subjects, jumping on crowded trucks and boats, inhabiting the immense vastness of the refugee camps.
Salgado followed a mother walking in a landscape of sand with her two undernourished children in the Region of Lake Faguibine, Mali, Africa in 1985; he chronicled the lives of the Hutu population of Rwanda, displaced in camps and slums, and the journey of 27 Moroccans in a Patera (small boat) in the Strait of Gibraltar in 1997, that anticipated the current migration flows that caught Europe unprepared.
One of the consequences of migration is that families often break up and in some cases desperate parents find themselves in such conditions that they have to abandon their children. In 1996 Salgado took a picture of abandoned babies playing on the roof of a government-run centre in São Paulo that seems directly linked with the current situation of many migrant children separated from their families and living alone in detention centres in the US.
There is a lot to take in behind each image: the gap between the rich and the poor; violence; natural disasters and the way climate change has mutated our landscapes and our lives; health scares and lives in refugee camps that have turned into small cities, into human - rather than urban - conglomerates.
The images pose many dilemmas to the viewers: first and foremost we are faced with a sad truth – migrations are still a reality and quite often we don't know how to deal with them and, while we walk towards the future, we keep on neglecting other fellow human beings, but also our planet - humanity and ecology go indeed hand in hand in Salgado's practice.
When Salgado eventually got sick while working on his images and encountering violence, hatred and brutality, he indeed refocused on another personal project - healing the devastated land that he inherited from his family in Brazil by planting millions of trees and starting the Instituto Terra, a small foundation devoted to the preservation of the ecosystem.
Visitors of "Exodus" in Pistoia will therefore be faced by many questions, but also find a few answers. Salgado's images remind us indeed that, to understand migration, we can't pretend migrants do not exist or build barriers and borders, but we must look at migration as a global phenomenon, and realise that people move from their home countries out of necessity.
In a nutshell, to be really able to understand this phenomenon and provide sustainable solutions, we have to move with this humanity - like Salgado did - rather than getting enmeshed in petty nationalisms.
Image credits for this post
All images: © Sebastião Salgado / Amazonas Images
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