Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper
Tate Collection
Works with images
General Collection
Serra Pelada
Collection
Acquisitions 2008-2009
<a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/sebastiao-salgado-12051" aria-label="More by Sebastião Salgado" data-gtm-name="header_link_artist" data-gtm-destination="page--artist">Sebastião Salgado</a>
Gold Mine Brazil
Accepted by HM Government in lieu of inheritance tax from the Estate of Barbara Lloyd and allocated to Tate 2009
adults
architecture
Brazil
countries and continents
crowd
emotions, concepts and ideas
formal qualities
groups
human rights
industrial
industrial and crafts
industrial society
ladder
landscape
man
man-made landmarks (non-UK)
mine
miner
objects
people
photographic
places
rocky
Serra Pelada gold mine
social comment
society
tools and machinery
work and occupations
<p>The <span>Serra Pelada </span>series focuses on miners and their working environment. The mountain site has been dramatically transformed by heavy mining activities. Here Salgado shows the miners as an integral part of this landscape.Salgado has documented working conditions across the world throughout his career. Since the 1990s he has also actively contributed to the reforestation and conservation of the Atlantic Forest in Brazil.</p><p><em>Gallery label, June 2021</em></p>
paper print photograph gelatin silver
17 May 2021 – 24 April 2022
2022-04-24
17 May 2021 – 24 April 2022
2022-04-24
2021-05-17
Tate Modern (London, UK)
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/
2021-05-17
Photography and Environment
Collection based display
The Gold Mine, Brazil
image: 435 × 286 mm
support: 500 × 400 mm
Accepted by HM Government in lieu of inheritance tax from the Estate of Barbara Lloyd and allocated to Tate 2009
<div class="text">
<p>
<i>The Gold Mine, Brazil </i>is a black and white photograph depicting a large number of mine workers densely packed together on various parts of a tall cliff.  The scene is shown at a distance and from a high vantage point, so that the workers appear very small and only their general forms are discernible. Some can be seen digging in pits in the lower part of the image, while others carry large sacks up the cliff by means of steep ladders, or stand at its brow, perhaps waiting to climb down. In the top section of the scene, which is misty and therefore less detailed, many workers can be seen carrying sacks away into the distance, suggesting that the mine continues beyond the edges of the frame and conveying a further sense of its vast size. The cliff face looks barren and rocky, while lower down the landscape appears muddier and some crude paths and fortifying walls can be seen.</p>
<p>This photograph was taken by the Brazilian social documentary photographer Sebastião Salgado at the Serra Pelada gold mine in north-west Brazil in 1986. It is part of <i>Serra Pelada</i>, a group of twenty-eight photographs that Salgado took of the mine in that year, when he spent several weeks living there and observing the workers (Ken Light, <i>Witness in Our Time: The Lives of Documentary Photographers</i>,<i> </i>Washington 2000, p.7). Around fifty thousand workers laboured at Serra Pelada while Salgado was there, each making as many as sixty trips down the cliff and back per day while carrying sacks that weighed between thirty and sixty kilograms, and they were paid twenty cents for each of these journeys (Stallabrass 1997, p.131).</p>
<p>Salgado’s photographs of the mine are part of a larger series of pictures entitled <i>Workers: An Archaeology of the Industrial Age</i> 1986–92 that includes three hundred and thirteen photographs from forty-two types of workplace in twenty-six countries. As well as producing individual prints of the images in this series, Salgado compiled them into a book of the same title in 1997. Throughout his career Salgado has used his photographic projects to explore social and economic conditions in countries across the world, stating in 1993 that his work ‘is not art and I certainly don’t think of myself as an artist: it is reportage’ (quoted in Jonathan Glancey, ‘Workers, Warriors, Heroes’, <i>Independent</i>, 15 December 1993, <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/workers-warriors-heros-sebastiao-salgados-workers-now-on-show-in-london-is-an-epic-account-of-the-world-of-manual-labour-but-what-does-it-tell-us-1467573.html">http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/workers-warriors-heros-sebastiao-salgados-workers-now-on-show-in-london-is-an-epic-account-of-the-world-of-manual-labour-but-what-does-it-tell-us-1467573.html</a>, accessed 21 November 2014).</p>
<p>The use of simple, objective description in title of this photograph could relate to the ‘archaeological’ nature of the wider series of which <i>The Gold Mine, Brazil </i>is a part. In 2013 Salgado said of the project</p>
<p class="cttext">
</p><blockquote>I saw that we were arriving at the end of the first big industrial revolution … And I saw in this moment that many things would be changed in the worker’s world. And I made a decision to pay homage to the working class. And the name of my body of work was <i>Workers: An Archaeology of the Industrial Age</i>. Because they were becoming like archaeology; it was photographs of something that was disappearing.<br/>(Salgado in Ryan Lash, ‘The Language of Photography: Q&amp;A with Sebastião Salgado’, <i>TEDBlog</i>, 1 May 2013, <a href="http://blog.ted.com/2013/05/01/the-language-of-photography-qa-with-sebastiao-salgado/">http://blog.ted.com/2013/05/01/the-language-of-photography-qa-with-sebastiao-salgado</a>, accessed 21 November 2014.)</blockquote>
<p>While some of Salgado’s pictures of Serra Pelada focus on individual workers or smaller groups (see <i>Mining, Brazil </i>1986, Tate <a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/salgado-mining-brazil-p13090" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>P13090</span></a>), this is one of several that emphasise the enormous size of the mine and its workforce. In <i>The Gold Mine, Brazil </i>workers are shown from a considerable distance in a way that makes them appear very similar, which has the effect of partly removing the individual identities of the workers. The cultural historian Parvati Nair has commented on this de-individualising of workers in the <i>Serra Pelada </i>series as a whole, stating that ‘Innumerable men, rendered alike by a shared abject poverty, become almost indistinguishable from the mud that covers their bodies: human[s] reduced to mere usage, without value, without name or distinction’ (Nair 2011, p.72).</p>
<p>Before becoming a photographer Salgado was a Marxist economist and activist, and he has acknowledged that this background influenced his decision to make a series depicting workers (see Lash 2013, accessed 21 November 2014). Salgado’s political concerns are reflected in his photographs of Serra Pelada through their emphasis on the physical hardship of working at the mine as well as the poor conditions experienced by its labourers, suggesting an interest in raising awareness about their situation. Furthermore, the art historian Julian Stallabrass has observed that Salgado’s images of the mine are shocking because they ‘present contemporary scenes which should have long been banished from the perfectible neoliberal state … [and] show in a supposedly post-industrial world, scenes of vast pre-industrial labour … scenes of naked exploitation and oppression’ (Stallabrass 1997, p.133).</p>
<p>
<b>Further reading</b>
<br/>Sebastião Salgado, <i>An Uncertain Grace</i>, London 1990, reproduced p.17.<br/>Julian Stallabrass, ‘Sebastião Salgado and Fine Art Photojournalism’, <i>New Left Review</i>, no.223, May–June 1997, pp.131–3, 146–7, 160.<br/>Parvati Nair, <i>A Different Light: The Photography of Sebastião Salgado</i>, Durham and London 2011, pp.71–3, 229–37, 262–3.</p>
<p>David Hodge<br/>November 2014</p>
<p>
<i>Supported by Christie’s.</i>
</p>
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Summary
2015-03-19T00:00:00
summary
SHORT_TEXT
<div class="text">
<p>The <i>Serra Pelada </i>series focuses on miners and their working environment. The mountain site has been dramatically transformed by heavy mining activities. Here Salgado shows the miners as an integral part of this landscape.<br/>Salgado has documented working conditions across the world throughout his career. Since the 1990s he has also actively contributed to the reforestation and conservation of the Atlantic Forest in Brazil.</p>
</div>

Display caption
2021-06-16T00:00:00
display-caption
DISPLAY_CAPTION
adults architecture Brazil countries and continents crowd emotions, concepts and ideas formal qualities groups human rights industrial industrial and crafts industrial society ladder landscape man man-made landmarks (non-UK) mine miner objects people photographic places rocky Serra Pelada gold mine social comment society tools and machinery work and occupations