The Salt of the Earth Page #4

although water is scarce.

Every person killed is a piece of the world that dies.

A father prepares his son for burial,

to say the last goodbye.

Usually it is the family that prepares its dead.

And know that the government

retains food, not allowed to reach the population

as happened there,

in that field in northern Ethiopia ...

It was a brutal political dishonesty.

Ethiopia Tigray Region, 1984

I returned to Ethiopia in late 1984.

By then, the guerrillas realized that the government was plundering the region.

They began to send people to Sudan.

They went through the region of Tigray.

There was an attack by two helicopters.

They were Mi-24 combat helicopters very fast.

They shot people with machine guns.

I took a picture and ran.

Many pregnant women walked

hoping to be able to eat and drink water

to reach the promised land.

I had to go there

at least two more months.

And when I arrived in Sudan,

I had a lot of work with the arrival of these people.

This man came from Ethiopia.

His son was exhausted, perhaps dead,

but the man was carrying.

When he got to the doctors the child was dead,

after so much walking.

We had to decamp from MSF.

Water is essential in these camps

and it was becoming a big problem.

You had to move as quickly as possible.

They piled into the trucks of the United Nations

to take them to another camp,

a beautiful and fertile land

on the banks of the Blue Nile.

I did about 300, 400 kilometers aboard these trucks.

Two of my friends truck,

They acted as if it were a Sunday afternoon either,

and they were telling stories under a tree.

Being close to the Nile, we had water.

But here people died

because there was no food.

They reached the edge of poverty.

They forgot or could not bring food.

There was a disorganization of food.

They said there was, that there was.

And when I got here there was nothing.

Me fui a Mali.

Here too there was a great drought.

The skin of the people were like the bark of trees.

Trees marked by wind and sand,

by sandstorms.

There were only women and children.

The men went to Libya to work,

or they migrated to Ivory Coast in search of work

with the promise to return and bring food for the family.

But very few returned.

All were safe

because MSF did a great job.

They brought aid to the region.

This is a friend, Luc, a Belgian doctor.

It is measuring and weighing the child.

After 15, 20 days, they were unrecognizable, healthier.

But they were scarred for life

because they lacked things during growth.

This kid was alone,

with his little guitar in hand,

He is carrying the remains of a shirt,

but not wearing pants.

Watch her determination, her posture.

He is someone who knows where it goes.

Looking for other groups of people,

with your dog ...

A boy of eight, nine years.

Sebastian is encarin

with the people of the Sahel region.

Again and again.

Photos, the book and the exhibition of Llia

They called the world's attention on droughts,

and the fate of millions of lives.

And unanswered questions about the cause of that situation.

Then Sebastiao turned to a topic that he spent another six years

and countless trips to almost thirty countries.

WORKERS:

The third volume of photographs conceived with Llia.

I wanted to pay a kind of homage

all men and women who built our world.

The archeology of the industrial era.

Sebastian y Lelia investigaron

and planned "Workers" meticulously.

Then he again traveled to the four corners of the world.

He photographed steelworkers in the Soviet Union,

he lived with saboteurs ships in Bangladesh,

sailed with fishermen in Galicia and Sicily,

He showed the mechanical production of cars in Kolkata.

He watched farmers in Rwanda,

country had already visited, but as an economist.

Now the mission was another.

His perspective had changed, but he was the same.

Driven by the same empathy for the human condition.

With each episode of "workers"

Sebastiao was completely submerged

in the field of manual labor.

As the weeks passed with miners in the gold mines of Serra Pelada.

In 1991, at the end of the first Gulf War,

Iraqi troops withdrew

and Saddam Hussein set fire to thousands of oil wells.

Thousands of firefighters from around the world descended on those oil fields.

Sebastiao had to go too,

driven by curiosity of this explosive profession.

When I saw the first images on TV,

I knew I had to do that report.

It was like working in a big theater.

Some 500 wells on fire.

A scene set in huge, the size of a planet.

No controlled us, we could go where we wanted.

There were fumes, thick smoke, oil.

All that accumulated smoke was so dense that the sun did not pass.

Sometimes it was dark 24 hours.

After putting out the fire

the ground was so hot,

I had to throw a lot of water for cooling,

if not, the temperature was so high that oil burn again.

Still, sometimes,

There was an explosion that sounded like a cannon.

The noise was deafening.

It was like working near the engine of a plane.

Today I'm a little deaf.

My deafness began then.

These are Canadians,

The Calgary Fire Department.

They brought a nice red truck.

And they had a rule: after putting out the fire,

I had to wash the truck every night.

The next morning, returned to be covered in oil.

A hell of a job!

I delayed my departure at least two or three times.

Until the day I had to leave.

It broke my heart

having to leave such a huge show.

I turned around,

until near the end,

when we passed a big wall.

That day was a reporter for the New York Times.

It was no longer anyone's territory. The war had destroyed everything.

We broke the door.

Upon entering,

a species discovered

Paradise

become a hell.

It was a kind of Garden of the royal family of Kuwait.

There were horses, thoroughbreds,

they had gone completely mad.

The animals are the first to escape before a catastrophe,

if they are free to escape.

But there they were not.

Birds found there, it was an oasis.

Everything was well irrigated.

Birds that could not fly because they were glued feathers.

Kuwaitis left to reach the disaster

leaving the confined animals,

together with the Bedouins, who are not considered human beings.

"Workers" managed to unite the Sebastiao Salgado economist

with the artist in which he had become.

These photographs have been published in the best journals,

the exhibition toured the world,

and the book was published in many languages.

Pero Sebastian y Lelia in pararon.

They immediately began work on a new phase of his photography.

They noted that another burning issue of our times

It was the displacement of entire populations

due to wars, famines and the role of the global market.

As Europe closed its borders,

Sebastiao trying to shed light on the lives of the marginalized.

Again with Lelia, he began researching and planning.

She was again the momentum of this new chapter

which they called "Exodus".

EXODUS:

It sparked global concern about the lives of these refugees

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