Monday, Mar. 27, 2000

Far From Home

By Richard Lacayo

Fast-action photography is no great trick anymore. The real trick is to pin down the slow motions that make the great arcs of history. This is what photographer Sebastiao Salgado has done over the past 10 years, as he traveled everywhere to watch and think about the relocations caused by war and the whiplashings of the global economy. And to show them. In Africa, Asia and the Balkans, it was knives and gunfire that moved millions of refugees. In Asia and Latin America, the simple but still desperate search for work pushed millions to the overpacked cities. The pictures on this and the following pages, from his new book, Migrations (Aperture; $100), are a portrait of what Salgado calls "the reorganization of the human family."

--By Richard Lacayo

The Refugees

When the cold war ended, a succession of murderous little wars took its place. Old hatreds that were held in check under the pressure of superpower rivalry sprang to life. It was both a familiar kind of bloodletting and a new kind. Security arrangements like NATO were of no use. They had been fashioned to keep East and West from resorting to long-range missiles, and were helpless at first to contain the face-to-face hatreds of Bosnia and Kosovo. Then there was Rwanda and Zaire, where each new episode of civil war and ethnic bloodlust created a small city of refugees. In Sudan, the civil war was worsened by drought and the associated famine, which was coolly manipulated by the warring sides. In all those locations, the ones who didn't die along the road found themselves penned for long stretches in huge camps, where hunger, pneumonia, cholera and diphtheria claimed more lives every day.

These were places where the heart got wrung dry. Salgado recalls how the suffering in the Rwandan refugee camps in 1994 eventually hardened people there to death. "One day I saw a man walking with a package in his hands. He tossed the package into a mass grave. I asked him what he had thrown there. He said, 'My son, who died.' Then he went on chatting with his friend." From scenes like that, Salgado learned to worry about one of the greatest human capabilities, adaptation. "We can adapt ourselves to any situation," he laments, "and believe that this is a normal life."

The Swollen Cities

Some migrations are forced at gunpoint. Others are set in motion by the global economy. Money is dynamite, and it can scatter people better than mortar fire. The world is well into the second Industrial Revolution, in which the developed nations have gone dotcom and service. Smokestack industry and light manufacturing have moved to the Third World, and farmers have been displaced by the transformation of family agriculture into corporate agribusiness. As workers everywhere have moved off somewhere else, looking for the headwaters of the global-money flows, oversize cities have exploded. Landless Philippine farmers pack into Manila, jobless Moroccans sneak into France, Central Americans pile across the U.S. border.

Can processes like these, so crucial but so complicated, be summed up in pictures? Salgado, a Brazilian who lives in Paris, was trained as an economist. He has an economist's grasp of exchange rates and trade deficits but a photographer's recognitions. He sees how the failure of policy and the market might just help produce these particular men and women with these particular gestures in this particular dump in Bombay. "We are living in an incredible revolution," he says, "comparable to the jump from the Middle Ages to the modern age, with the difference that now it is going much, much faster. We are inside this revolution, so we don't pay enough attention."

And what is attention? It's the combination of eyesight and understanding. What it means is: look plus think.