Salgado Talks

Sebastião Salgado now works using a Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III and you can read a fairly long interview with him on the Canon Professional site. Although I admire much of his work, somehow he isn’t a photographer whose pictures I would go out of my way to see, though I can’t quite justify why not. Perhaps he makes things a bit too neat and pretty for me, things that I feel should be messier and somehow have more life. But it’s hard not to admire the man and his work, including the “epic Genesis project” that this interview is about, though perhaps the description of the work as ‘epic’ is part of what worries me.

In some ways what I found most interesting about the piece was the technical stuff at the end, where we find that he has a specially modified camera to give him the 645 frame format ratio. He also says “I don’t look at the back of the camera after I take a picture. I only look [at the end of a day’s shoot] very quickly to see if there is a problem.” I have to admit that I don’t often look at the camera back, though I like to do so occasionally, not to see if I have got the picture I want, but more to see if I have got a picture at all. I find it only too easy to forget some vital setting which means I get the exposure totally wrong, perhaps forgetting that I had dialled in a couple of stops exposure compensation earlier. It does all appear in the viewfinder display, but I find I don’t usually notice that when I’m really engaged with the subject.

But Salgado really does take things a stage further,  pretending he is still using film and having contact prints made for him of the 10,000 images from each trip to work from and make his “edits with a loop.” The sentence that had me fooled for a moment until I realised that it meant a ‘loupe’.

He says he doesn’t shoot more on digital than he did on film, and on a 645 film camera, those 10,000 images would have ended up well over 600 contact prints. Perhaps he really did shoot that many films, but it seems rather a lot.

He then has his Paris lab make “a physical negative” from the digital file, and his prints are made from this. The article doesn’t make clear whether he – or his printer – works on the digital file to carry out any necessary ‘dodging’ and ‘burning’ or other corrections, or whether this are left to the final darkroom stage.

I also learn that he has 8 lenses and a 1.4x tele-extender, but perhaps surprisingly nothing wider than 24mm, which I would find rather limiting.  But I certainly applaud his advice to young documentary photographers that they need to have a good understanding “of history, of geopolitics, of sociology and anthropology” rather than technical knowledge being of paramount importance, though I see I have changed his word ‘knowledge’ into ‘understanding.’

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