Sebastiao Salgado needs no introduction. He is photographic royalty. If you need reminding of that then you can read a litany of his achievements on a large wall stencil at this touring exhibition currently showing at Manchester Science and Industry Museum. What’s more, if you did have any doubts about the quality of his photographic work then the exhibition’s promotional material will put you straight. It is, we are told, “incredible”, “powerful”, “breathtaking” and “stunning”. It is “beautiful and evocative” and “Visitors can’t fail to be inspired” (so if you do fail to be inspired that’s your problem, right?). The press release, apparently without irony, calls it “a blockbuster”.
What, then, does the visitor get at this exhibition? There are over 200 photographs which can be divided generally into landscape and portrait images. The landscape photographs are unframed and vary from big to huge. I didn’t have a tape measure with me but I’d estimate the biggest to be about 6 by 8 feet and the smaller ones to be about 5 by 4. Those biggest ones are on the side walls and the rest are hung from the ceiling. They are divided physically into sections in the exhibition: The Forest; The Mountains; and so on. In the middle of the main exhibition area, in settings designed to represent indigenous housing, are smaller framed and mounted photographs which are portraits of several groups of local peoples and of their way of life. These are mounted and framed in some sort of laminate. All the images are black and white.
Gallery View courtesy of Manchester Science and Industry Museum
The curator of the exhibition, Leila Wanick Salgado says in her notes that the purpose of hanging images at different heights and in different formats is to make the visitor feel enveloped in a forest. The photographs are interspersed with written material which varies from the factual and informative to the campaigning or hectoring depending on your point of view. “It is the duty of all human beings across the planet to participate in its [Amazonia’s] protection”, we are admonished at one point.
Throughout the main exhibition is a soundtrack by Jean Michel Jarre “inspired by the authentic sounds of the forest”. In addition, there are two separate soundtracks in side rooms. The first, by Brazilian musician Rodolfo Stroeter, accompanies a slide show of portrait photographs. The second is a symphonic poem by Villa Lobos and accompanies a slideshow of landscape images. With the three soundtracks, at certain points in the exhibition you get what I think of as The Debenhams Experience where the music being played at one concession clashes badly with that being played at the concession next to it.
Finally, the visitor hacks his way through this sensory entanglement to the photographs themselves. These are in Salgado’s hallmark style – powerful, contrasty images of a kind which has been widely admired throughout his career. There is no doubt that he is a very accomplished photographer in what I would call the Transcendentalist tradition. Whatever the titles and subjects of his various books and exhibitions, his underlying theme is of the inherent goodness of people and nature and their corruption by society and its institutions. Roiling skies abound.
Mariua Archipelago, Rio Negro, Brazil, 2019, © Sebastiao Salgado.
There has been much discussion of his method over the years but the consensus now seems to be that he uses digital cameras to capture the images and then produces what is known as an internegative to swap them back into an analogue workflow for wet printing in a darkroom to get the traditional film look.
There is no denying that the landscape images in the exhibition are powerful but there is only so much a photographer, even of Salgado’s standing, can do with the river/jungle/sky troika. The smaller, mounted images in the centre of the exhibition speak with a quieter voice. There are some lovely, unaffected portraits with background notes about the people and their culture.
I think the exhibition’s big problem is that the photographs are not allowed to speak for themselves. They are badly hemmed in by the curation. For example – why are the photographs printed so big? It is very fashionable, of course, but photography is a reductive medium: you can, almost literally, hold the world in the palm of your hand. The unspoken suggestion seems to be that the bigger the image the more impressive it must be. But this gives the practical problem that the observer has to stand well back from such large images and in places the hanging arrangement hampers that. One photo gets in the way of the sightlines for another. Plus, on top of the 200 or so images you have three sets of music, two slideshows, a documentary of indigenous leaders, extensive wall annotations, no natural light and and occasional tannoy announcements from the museum.
As I was walking around the exhibition a scene jumped into my mind from the film Spinal Tap – the famous “eleven” scene where guitarist Nigel is explaining how the band’s amplifiers go “one louder” than all the other bands just for that “extra push over the cliff”. It made me think - they could have called this exhibition “Amazonia – Eleven”.
Just sometimes, photography is pure magic. In a split second it can spark up the mind’s electrodes and fire the imagination to great heights. This is the true power of the medium but it takes faith to let photography speak for itself and not heavy-handed curation. There are doubtless those who will love the total immersive experience but it wasn’t for me. These images need silence and meditation. I came out desperate for a bit of peace and quiet.
“Amazonia” is at The Science and Industry Museum, Manchester until 14th August.