Serra Pelada

The test runs on two levels. Within the strongest frames little can go: in the wide view of the pit the ladders turn a crowd into an ascent, the terraces give the scale its steps, and the rim is the only exit and the only horizon; take any away and the picture is a crowd in a hole. In the picture of the miner and the policeman the rifle between them is the whole argument. But a series is assembled, and this one admits the question. The carrier on the ladder recurs, the mud-covered body recurs, and several frames make the same point at a slightly different distance; the series has been shown in sets of different size without seeming incomplete. Necessary in its principal images, accreted in its body.

Score: 7.8 / 10

What is brought into the open can be stated, and it holds. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, in a country entering the industrial world, gold was being dug by hand, by bodies, at a scale the eye reads as the building of the ancient world: hand labour of that kind was not a past stage but a present condition, produced by the market for one metal. And these men were not slaves. Each was there by a choice, as a claim holder, a partner or a carrier paid by the sack, wagering the body on a share of the find; the slope that looks like servitude is a crowd of gamblers. Held below the gate because that deepest disclosure needs the caption, the image alone saying bondage, and because the beauty has been seriously argued to turn the condition into spectacle.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Elevation is high and recurrent, and it is of the dreadful kind. The wide views are among the most sublime images of labour photography holds: the pit as a funnel of people, figures so many and so small that the slope seems to seethe, the ladders rising in columns out of the mud toward a rim of light. The response is the terror of number and depth, met without a single exaggeration of the place. It rises again at the other scale: a single carrier, whitened with mud, shoulders a sack on a rung and becomes a figure from a frieze; a man lies against the ground with the stillness of a body taken down. Held a step below the summit because the elevation is mostly of one key; tenderness, comedy and calm are largely absent, and the resting pictures supply only a little of them.

Score: 8.7 / 10

The particular stays particular: this pit, these men, 1986, mud from one hill in Pará, faces that can be told apart. And it becomes archetypal by construction, not by caption. The ladders and terraces make the slope a stair, a Babel turned inside out, dug down rather than built up; the files of carriers are the labourers of every empire; the mud, which coats the men to the colour of the ground, makes them clay figures, the body as the material it is digging; the search for gold among the poor is the oldest economic myth of the Americas, played out by its own people. The descent of Dante and the Last Judgement come to viewers at once, and the structure of the wide views earns them. Held at the gate because part of the myth is lent by the history of painting, and the series sometimes leans on the loan.

Score: 8.5 / 10

The inheritance is concerned photography: Lewis Hine’s pictures of labour, the Farm Security Administration, W. Eugene Smith’s long essays, above all Minamata, and the humanist tradition of Magnum, which Salgado joined in 1979. The departure is real but not a reversal. He took the documentary essay as the press was turning to colour and the short assignment and made it black and white, epic and slow: long access, weeks in the pit, a monumental and classical composition applied to the poor. The stake was material, the access and the physical risk and the cost of a project outside the editorial market, and critical, since the beauty invited a charge that came. But the turn intensifies Smith more than it leaves him: the dramatic print, the heroic figure and the essay form were there before.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Would a different form change what the series knows? Much of it. In colour the pit would be a report: ochre and red earth, a blue sky, specific and of 1986. In black and white the mud and the skin are one substance and one tone, and that sameness is the knowledge that these men are made of what they dig. The deep tonal range, holding detail in the shadowed terraces and in the lit rim at once, lets the mass read as thousands of individuals and not as texture. The series form is itself an instrument: the wide view says the mass, the close view says the man, and only the alternation knows that the mass is made of men. Held below the top because the timelessness the black and white confers lifts the scene out of its year, its economy and its politics.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Evidence over promise: forty years. The wide images sustain return at the level of detail: at the size of a print each figure on the slope is doing something particular, climbing, waiting, arguing, standing still, and the eye can go back into the mass and find new men. The questions the series has kept open have been argued in print and in teaching for decades: whether beauty in the documentation of suffering dignifies or consumes it, whether the archetypal reading erases the economics, what the photographer owes his subjects, whether the miner at the rifle is resistance or fraternity. Held near 8 because much of the return is to that debate rather than to the images, the debate has settled into two known positions, and the close pictures, once read, are mostly read.

Score: 8.1 / 10

Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of documentary photography of the 1980s and early 1990s. Intrinsic force: the series is the most concentrated statement of what Salgado’s work as a whole reorganised, the long, self-directed documentary project in black and white with the ambition of an epic, for which Workers (1993) is the full form and Serra Pelada the core. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the pictures fixed the public image of Serra Pelada itself, in Brazil and abroad; they are the centre of Workers, one of the most widely shown photographic exhibitions of its decade; and they became the central case in the argument over aestheticised suffering. Discounted because much of that reach belongs to the career, and no later work is shown to derive from them.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at forty years. Form: whole; the series exists in negatives, in prints in many collections and in books, and no single loss would take it. Presence: wide and continuous since 1986, through magazine publication, Workers, Gold, the film of 2014 and the exhibitions that followed the maker’s death; the images have outlived the mine, long closed to manual work, and the conditions that made them. That presence is broad, but much of it is the fame of the maker and of one or two images, and fame is presence, not proof, so the widest figure is not given. Fabric: gelatin silver on fibre paper is among the most stable photographic processes; who keeps the negatives and who prints now, after the maker’s death, is a small open question.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Judged as command of black and white photography. The making is load-bearing. Composition in chaos: in a scene of thousands moving at once, the wide views find the position at which the ladders become verticals, the terraces horizontals and the mass a structure; that is position, timing and lens chosen in the mud, not luck. Tone: the printing holds the full scale from the black of wet shadow to the white of the sky, with mud and skin kept apart by a few values, so that bodies stand out of a ground of the same matter; the prints were made with printers under his direction. Light: the hard tropical light is used, not suffered, to carve the single figures. The costs: a manner that can tip into the dramatic, with heavy burning of skies and edges in some prints, a recurring heroic frame, and a range of means narrow by choice.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the widest view of the pit, in which no man is larger than a mark, and the close picture of a single carrier’s face and shoulder. They obey one law: the body in the earth, rendered in one tonal key, in which flesh and mud share a value and ascent is the direction of every effort. Every picture is that law at a different distance, and the confrontation with the policeman obeys it too, two bodies at the edge of the pit with the state’s weapon between them. The range is wide, from the mass to the face, from labour to rest to dispute. Held below the top because the order varies across showings and no single sequence fixed by the maker is known, and because the law is partly a style, the same in Salgado’s other projects, rather than one found here.

Score: 8.3 / 10

For a series of photographs the orders held are many, and several are integrated. Labour, at the centre, in its most physical form. The economy: gold, the claim, the carrier paid by the sack, the body wagered on a share, and through gold the world market the pit serves. The state: the police at the rim, the rifle. The natural order: a hill dug out by hand into a pit, the mountain consumed. The mass and the individual, which the form holds in one structure. History and myth, through the archetypes the slope builds. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what stays outside the frame or present only by implication: the family, the town of the miners, women, the sacred except as evocation, and the miners’ own words and lives outside the pit.

Score: 7.3 / 10