In the frame with the Survival charity auction
THERE are two images by celebrated photographer Sebastião Salgado in an online auction running at the moment to raise funds for Survival International, the global organisation which supports tribal peoples’ rights. His photograph of gold miners toiling like worker ants in a Brazilian pit still startles almost 30 years after it first stopped the world in its tracks. It could have been a picture taken in 1886 rather than 1986.
“That photo made Salgado famous back in the ’80s,” says Ghislain Pascal, the show’s curator. “His series of the gold miners in Brazil put him on the map. It turned him into an overnight sensation. There was sheer surprise when the photograph was published that this kind of gold mining was still going on in the twentieth century.
