Salgado - May 29 2025

 

Salgado

May 29 2025



He worked in black and white.

In contrast

subtle greys

shades of light and dark.

Because it’s never either/or.

The world is not categorical

or compartmentalized,

even though it’s tempting

to see it that way.

He understood how colour distracts

seduces

overwhelms.

All those frequencies of light

making too much noise,

cancelling out

and reinforcing.

A cerulean blue,

so beautiful

in and of itself.

Life

as we already know it

so fail to see.

While he has gravitas.

His photographs cut to the core

cull and distil;

a captured moment

rendered monumental,

and for however long

posterity lasts.

So his work

is not black and white

but in between.

Because purity

is impossible,

and those who claim or seek it

cause endless suffering.

Black, the absence of light

while white is its entirety.

But as he well knew

there is no black

cold as the end of time,

no white

like the moment of creation.

When, out of nothingness

a blinding light burst forth

containing the universe,

expanding out

in all directions

as fast as light can go.

The entire spectrum

compressed into a single beam

as white as white can be.

Yet as far from pure

as any mongrel shade.

The great Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado recently died. One of his obituaries contained the phrase “he worked in black and white”, and it immediately jumped out at me. The simplicity of the statement, yes. The word “to work”, yes: a humble and unassuming choice for an artist. But mostly, it was the double meaning: how black and white thinking is categorical and simplistic, while the subtleties of black and white photography somehow create powerful images that elicit great depths of thought and feeling. Not in the least simplistic. So really, he took black and white pictures, but didn’t “work in” black and white at all!

Purity is the bugaboo of ideologues. The Nazis and the “woke” left of today have absolutely nothing in common except this: either the purity test of race, or the purity test of accepted leftist ideology. Both exemplify the falseness, futility, and danger of black and white thinking; of a right or left, good or bad, in or out worldview.