Blackness in Black and White: Serra

: Since their publica/on in Sunday Times Magazine in 1987, the photographs of the biblically sized Serra Pelada gold mine in northern Brazil by Sebas/ão Salgado have garnered an empha/cally posi/ve recep/on. In “Blackness in Black and White: Sebas/ão Salgado and Serra Pelada,” I argue there is a system of racial coding in his photographs of the Serra Pelada gold mine that has received liHle aHen/on in the photographic discourse. I examine the photographs in dialogue with visual histories of enslavement and the exploita/on of black bodies in nineteenth-century Brazil and the United States, and the complexi/es of racial iden/ty and hierarchy in late twen/eth-century Brazil. Through this analysis, I also highlight blind spots in the English-language discourse on Salgado’s gold photographs, which seek to both universalize their themes and aesthe/cize their content by challenging his own characteriza/on of the photographs. My primary objec/ve is not to argue that Salgado’s photographic decisions, which were made manifest in this systemiza/on, were premeditated, but rather to assert its presence within the photographs and in doing so, oﬀer a more poli/cally and culturally nuanced analysis of the photographs.

In September 1986, Brazilian documentary photographer Sebas/ão Salgado arrived at a remote hill in the state of Pará in northern Brazil.As Salgado himself described the scene thirty-three years later, "When I first reached Serra Pelada, I was leW speechless.Before me, I saw a vast hole, perhaps 200 meters in diameter and almost as deep, teeming with tens of thousands of barely clothed men, roughly half of them carrying heavy sacks up broad wooden ladders, the other leaping down muddy slopes back into the cavernous maw."1Before him, some 50,000 men worked with rudimentary tools in search of gold.The rugged terrain and weather made it impossible for heavy machinery to be used.
Taken over the course of four weeks, the photographs of the miners at Serra Pelada were the first installment of a six-year project undertaken by Salgado to photograph manual labor in an industrialized and mechanized world.The project, eventually /tled Workers: An Archaeology of the Industrial Age, took him to five con/nents photographing lead and iron mines and refineries in Kazakhstan, tobacco and sugarcane planta/ons in Cuba, fishing in Galicia and Sicily, and bicycle factories in Shanghai and Tianjin, China, in addi/on to twenty other sec/ons.There has been a largely successful campaign by proponents of the Workers photographs and Salgado himself to universalize their subject maHer and themes, with sociologist Tamara Kay arguing his work covers "the 'Family of Man' gamut, depic/ng people working, building, loving, warring, playing, celebra/ng and grieving-without invoking stereotypes." 2 Par/cularly, the discourse on the Serra Pelada photographs tends to universalize themes and aesthe/cize the contents of the photographs.I argue the photographs of Serra Pelada shun these rather simplis/c and one-dimensional interpreta/ons, instead requiring a more nuanced and mul/-dimensional analysis of their thema/c and aesthe/c ambi/ons.3I will argue that within Salgado's photographs of Serra Pelada, there is a systemized racial coding of black labor, which engages with both visual histories and contemporary socioeconomics.Through the evoca/on and allusion of race and class dynamics in Brazil, the photographs collec/vize rather than universalize.Thus, the photographs must be situated within the context of late twen/eth-century Brazilian economic and labor poli/cs and visual histories of black labor in the United States and Brazil.
The discovery of gold at Serra Pelada in January 1979 by a local farmer brought some 22,000 prospectors to the area within five weeks.Without any regula/on or oversight, the site and nearby boomtown quickly descended into the chaos.In the photographs taken from the upper rim of the mine, the viewer is forced to confront the sheer scale and enormity of the opera/on, both in terms of the mine's physical size and the amount of people [Figure 1].While anybody was allowed to prospect with rudimentary tools, thus leading to the almost biblical amounts of prospectors, the actual mineral rights were those of the government.In May 1980, the government in Brazil ordered the Federal Police into Serra Pelada, and the state-owned mining company Companhia Vale do Rio Doce, or CVRD, opened an office at the site.Salgado had first aHempted to photograph Serra Pelada in 1980, but was denied access by the military dictatorship, which had ins/tuted restric/ons on the press when it seized power in 1964. 4Salgado was living in Paris at the /me, in self-imposed exile as protest against the regime.By 1986, the military dictatorship was no longer in power and the prospectors coopera/ve indulged Salgado's request.Despite the free-for-all appearance, the mine operated under a regimented structure.The open pit was divided into plots or barrancos, each around sixty-five meters square (6.5 x 10 W.).In the introduc/on to Gold, the 2019 exhibi/on catalogue for the en/re body of Serra Pelada photographs, Salgado describes a labor hierarchy made of three classes: the owner of the plot; an investor in the opera/on who func/oned as a form of supervisor, called the capitalista; and some thirty peons, or diggers and carriers. 5Working eleven hours a day, six days a week, the peons would dig up the ground on the plot, filling sacks with forty kilos (eighty-eight pounds) of earth, and carry them up the slopes on narrow paths and up ladders.From the numerous sacks of earth dug each day, each peon would pick one to keep for themselves, with the capitalista taking the others.Inevitably, the vast majority of sacks contained no gold or other valuable minerals like manganese and black gold, which can be separated into regular gold and palladium were thrown out in the search for gold. 6ne of the most recurrent themes across the photographs is the physicality of gold mining, with many emphasizing the exhaus/on of the men and the emo/onal and physical toll their labor has taken on them.OWen, this takes visual form in men completely covered in mud and dirt.In these images, the men have become almost completely consumed, in appearance, by the mine [Figure 2].Through this, their individuality is lost and bodies and faces merge into large, amorphous, and unruly organisms.
While Salgado himself said in 2019, "Here, blacks and whites and men of every shade between worked shoulder-shoulder, with gold the only color on their minds," I am not certain that this statement tells the en/re truth. 7For one, the no/on of a space without considera/ons of color is problema/cally simplis/c given the immense complexity of racial and ethnic iden/ty in Brazil.Equally, there is something poten/ally problema/c in how Salgado describes the racial complexity of the miners, with white and black on the opposite ends of a spectrum.I would argue that Salgado deliberately suggests a colorized labor hierarchy, cri/cal to which is the usage of black-and-white film.
In the nearly all photographs of Serra Pelada by Salgado, the capitalistas are easily iden/fiable in their white t-shirts amongst a sea of ochre stained skin and clothes.In one image, the capitalista stands on a flat piece of ground, as lines of peons slowly trudge past him towards the ladders [Figure 3].He looks towards the sky, with a watch on his wrist and a clipboard in his hand.On the far right of the image's lower register, a man iden/fiable as of African descent looks directly at the camera as he waits his turn to climb the ladder in search of wealth.Within the visual vocabulary Salgado u/lizes, there is a coloriza/on of the worker hierarchy in the mine that explicitly suggests black labor and white management.Those who work are iden/fied with dark colors and those who oversee are iden/fied with lighter colors.Even in images that show labor on smaller scales, that division is s/ll clear.While the peons pan for gold in what is likely water heavily toxified by mercury, a pair of capitalistas lean against a wooden railing, looking out of frame.
Unlike works by other photographers, including Alfredo Jaar and Robert Nickelsberg, a considerable amount of Salgado's photographs of Serra Pelada are focused on the floor of the mine, as opposed to around the rim.As such, many images, par/cularly those of the ladders, have a striking upward viewpoint [Figure 4].These images, in effect, embody the perspec/ve of the peons, and through this composi/onal device, Salgado in/mates a literal stra/fica/on of labor.In many images from within the mine, like the one discussed earlier, the capitalistas are posi/oned above the peons, oWen standing upon these huge piles of sandbags.Equally, within a given image, the peons could outnumber the capitalistas twenty or thirty to one.This huge disparity in the amount of dark labor and white management is visually sugges/ve of a slave planta/on.This is undoubtedly a serious comparison to make, and I do not do so lightly.
One par/cular photograph directly engages with the visual history of slavery [Figure 5].In it, a young man sits before the wall of ladders.The dark tones of the man's skin and shirt appear to almost merge into a single surface.The rippling on the back of the young man's shirt is undoubtedly sugges/ve of photographs of keloid scarring on the backs of enslaved people from the nineteenth-century United States [Figure 6].While the image of Gordon by William McPherson is from the United States, the visual evoca/on of slavery within a Brazilian context is a loaded one.The abolishment of slavery in Brazil had occurred less than one hundred years prior to these photographs, in May 1888.Photographs of slavery and enslaved people by the likes of João Goston and Marc Ferrez during the final years of its existence in Brazil belies its immense brutality.Of the roughly twelve million African people enslaved and trafficked to the New World, almost half were sent to Brazil.
Beyond the more direct connec/ons to imagery of slavery and exploited black labor, other composi/onal techniques are more metaphorical.Images specifically of the ladders and those taken from the rim of the mine emphasize it as a space of containment of black labor.In many images of Serra Pelada, the ladder itself func/ons as a metaphor for the existence of the peons.In climbing the ladder, they are aHemp/ng to climb the social ladder.Each trip up the ladder represents their poten/al /cket out of Serra Pelada and to a new life, but each failed trip sends them back into the mine and back into the clay.When a peon would find gold, they would don a clean, striped t-shirt, making themselves iden/fiable to the guards as in need of protec/on from theW or assault.8Not only have they obtained wealth, but they are also now en/tled to protec/on by, what is in effect, law enforcement.
Within the color hierarchy, this is in effect, a "mulaHoiza/on" of the peon upon their discovery of gold and obtainment of wealth. 9S/ll, they are not allowed to fully transform into a capitalista and don a white shirt.In wearing a striped shirt, they are no longer a peon, but not quite a capitalista.Even upon their gaining of wealth and associated socioeconomic status, their status as a peon, an ocher-stained laborer, cannot be forgoHen.In one par/cular image, a man in a striped shirt, sits on a rock ledge, looking out across the vast mine which he has now, partly, and perhaps only temporally, escaped from.To his leW, a man in a black shirt and shorts slowly climbs into frame.The thick wood rungs on the ladder par/ally obscure him.His head looks downward at the dozens of men beneath him.If he were to find gold in the sack on his back, he may don a striped shirt too and be allowed a moment of reflec/on and relaxa/on.
In press coverage of Serra Pelada, there was an aHempt to characterize the opera/on in rela/on to nineteenth-century gold rushes, with it being described in a TIME ar/cle from September 1980 as "a tropical version of the nineteenth-century Klondike."10Following the discovery of gold in the Klondike region of the Yukon Territory in 1896, some 100,000 prospectors made the long and dangerous journey to the minefields over the next three years.While gold fever was not a new concept and can explain the general fervor, the specific reasons why so many would go to Serra Pelada requires us to examine the socioeconomic condi/ons of 1980s Brazil.It was under the military dictatorship that the Brazilian government expanded economic policies of state-centralized planning and market regula/on begun during the Estado Novo in the 1940s by Getúlio Vargas, par/ally through the crea/on and expansion of stateowned enterprises like CVRD.These economic policies and their consequences were described by economist Marcos Mendes as having "amplified an already historically high income and wealth inequality, making Brazil one of the most unequal countries in the world." 11n 1985, forty-two percent of the Brazilian popula/on lived below the poverty line and these economic inequali/es effected Afro-Brazilian people at much higher rates.According to the Ins/tute of Applied Economic Research, while the white and black popula/ons six years later, in 1991, accounted for fiWy-one percent and forty-seven percent of Brazil's 147 million people, respec/vely, sixty-four percent of the nearly fiWy-nine million in poverty were black.I do not dispute Salgado's claim that people of a mul/tude of racial and ethnic backgrounds worked and prospected at Serra Pelada, but given how Afro-Brazilian people dispropor/onately experienced income inequality and poverty and the poten/al riches on offer in gold mining that would likely be unobtainable otherwise, it is not unreasonable to assume the majority of peons at Serra Pelada were people of color.
However, much of the popular discourse on the Pelada photographs does not engage with the poli/cal context or the evoca/on of race.Inevitably, the discussion focuses on the scale and monumentality of the photographs' subject maHer and Salgado's methodology.Praise is effusive and free flowing.In a 2019 review of Gold, Neill Burgess, the man responsible for the photographs being first published in Sunday Times Magazine in May 1987, described the series as "a roman/c, narra/ve work that engaged with its immediacy, but had not a drop of sen/mentality.It was astonishing, an epic poem in photographic form." 12he vaun/ng of the photographs draws in the monumental, perhaps the biblical.A strange phenomenon exists in the discourse in which the photographs are discussed in the abstract and not as actual photographs.Among the sources that deal with the Serra Pelada photographs more or less exclusively, there is not a great deal of formal analysis, and it seems that the photographs are, disappoin/ngly, u/lized as proxies for large and grandiose discussions of the universal human experience.That is not to say that all these discussions are not valuable or intriguing, but most of them miss the mark.
A sizable por/on of the discourse focuses on the importance of the Pelada images in the revitaliza/on of black-and-white documentary photography.Indeed, color photography had surpassed black-and-white in importance by the mid-1980s, and color photographs of Serra Pelada had already appeared in Life Magazine in December 1980 and Time Magazine in 1985.Salgado shot in color earlier in his career, despite his preference for "the chiaroscuro paleHe of black-and-white images."13Indeed, it is the heightened expression of drama and intensity of black-and-white photography that gives the Serra Pelada images so much of their baroque magne/sm.
Equally, it is the usage of black-and-white film as a system of control that allows for the coloriza/on of labor to be effec/ve as a visual vocabulary and thema/c device.Given how deliberate and pa/ent Salgado is in all aspects of his prac/ce, the no/on that those specific details would have come by chance or accident simply does not fit.And that begs the ques/on, why does Salgado not acknowledge these choices?He does allude to race consistently in the exhibi/on catalogues for Workers, which included twenty-eight images of Serra Pelada and Gold.In the brief introduc/on to the photographs of Serra Pelada in Workers, Salgado writes, "No one is taken by force, yet once they arrive, all become slaves of the dream of gold and the need to stay alive.And once inside, it becomes impossible to leave."14This single quote alludes to three dis/nct aspects, both historic and contemporary, of the black experience in Brazil from the Atlan/c Slave trade and enslavement on planta/ons to contemporary socioeconomic repression.Dynamics of race, socioeconomics, and labor inequality are all at play within the mine and they are at play in Salgado's photographs.
While there is cri/cism and dissent among scholars and cri/cs about Salgado's prac/ce more broadly and these photographs in par/cular, the issue of race is typically not directly addressed in rela/on to the Serra Pelada photographs.Cri/cism is usually focused on the aesthe/ciza/on of suffering, which is a frequent point of discussion with regard to Salgado's work.15That said, I am not the first English-language scholar to assert the visuality of black labor in these photographs.Marcus Wood makes men/on of Salgado's Serra Pelada photographs as the late twen/eth-century photographic apogee of the intersec/on of ac/on photography and the visuality of black bodies in Brazil in Black Milk, although the discussion is contained to a single sentence. 16egardless of inten/onality, to allude and evoke the complexi/es of blackness, racial iden/ty, and labor poli/cs in Brazil in the visual themes and subject maHer of the photographs, in the wriHen promo/onal materials, and in the scholarly and cri/cal discourse, and then to deny or simply not address those complexi/es as a cri/cal part of the photographs' thema/c ambi/ons is both a wasted opportunity to examine the images in their dynamic sociopoli/cal context and more troublingly, a relega/on of the importance of black labor and black bodies to the point of non-acknowledgement.The evoca/on and allusion to blackness is more explicitly and deliberately present than Salgado himself says.
And herein lies the key stumbling block of discussing and examining Salgado's images of Serra Pelada and its miners.By not recognizing the evoca/on and allusion to the complexity of labor and race in Brazil, we are unable to engage with the photographs from the perspec/ve that is the most important.Widening the scope further to include the en/re body of Workers, what makes the photographs deeply magne/c, consequen/al, and cap/va/ng is the way in which they engage with their temporal and geographic contexts.How gold miners in Brazil relate to ranchers in North Dakota or oil workers in Kuwait in a globalized, complex system of labor is vastly more interes/ng than how the photographs document the universal aspects of work and humanity.Rather than focusing on the universal, we must focus on the collec/ve and the complex.In doing so, we will be both geung the most out of Salgado's photographs as works of art and documents of socioeconomic tectonics and doing the most for ourselves as we aHempt to end inequity and inequality.