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Can Suffering Be Too Beautiful?

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

"SENTIMENTAL voyeurism" is the latest
jab, this one from Jean-Fran鏾is Chevrier,
a French art professor, in Le Monde. Clearly it's
tough being the world's most famous
photojournalist.

Even people who sympathize with what Sebasti鉶
Salgado does and what sane person would not?
complain that his pictures are too beautiful,
which is not something you might normally complain
about when you look at photographs, especially
unforgettable ones.

But the key word is "normally," the 56- year-old
Brazilian-born Mr. Salgado not being a normal
photographer. He is a superstar in the Robert
Capa, Chim and Henri Cartier- Bresson tradition,
and what he photographs is not what most of his
audience, or at least most of the audience for his
latest exhibition at the International Center of
Photography in Midtown Manhattan, would regard
as normal life.

One hopes not, anyway. These pictures come from
his latest book, "Migrations." It is the product of
seven years of travel to more than 35 countries
(including Afghanistan, Rwanda, the Balkan nations
and pretty much every other troubled and terrible
spot you can think of), documenting what he calls
"the reorganization of the human family" that has
come about partly through the shift from "majority
rural to majority urban."

Having previously borne witness to widespread
starvation in Africa and chronicled manual labor all over the world, Mr. Salgado
here turns his immense energies to the millions of refugees, exiles, orphans, landless
peasants, homeless families, boat people, internees and others who today endure
incredible hardships to escape even more extreme circumstances.

This is a sprawling, frequently gruesome story the scale and the gravity of it
should speak for themselves and if the suffering doesn't prompt guilt, indifference
to it will. That's how emotional blackmail and effective moral photojournalism work.
Mr. Salgado practices both as well as anyone does these days.

The greater the suffering, the grander his artistic ambition, naturally. His is the
paradoxical situation of being a celebrated artist of forgotten people, which is a
starting point for much of the carping.

But let's dispense with petty criticisms first. The show, like the book, includes too
many photographs that aren't up to his best. Even great journalists need editors. Mr.
Salgado's wife, L閘ia Wanick Salgado, oversaw the exhibition. It has a superfluous,
melodramatic video of pictures accompanied by music. The photographs are
accompanied by explanatory captions that are sometimes vague and not helpful.
There is no sense of independent oversight.

Resistance to the work, which after all exists ostensibly to gain recognition for
overlooked masses of destitute people, is fueled by signs of vanity. It is also fueled
by the cult of appreciation around Mr. Salgado, which has tended to equate doubt
about the photographs with lack of sympathy for their subjects, if simply because of
the sanctimony of its praise for him. It's a tricky business to get people to look at
other people they may have spent a great deal of time trying, consciously or
otherwise, not to notice.

That said, the good photographs are so stupendously gorgeous that they make you
forget everything else while you are looking at them. They bespeak uncanny formal
intuition, a ready repertory of apt allusions to art history and peerless timing (and
some luck maybe, too, which all great photojournalists have). This applies whether
the image is a panoramic blur of jostling commuters at a Bombay railroad station,
wherein a visual clich of human overpopulation and modern travel is transformed
into a minor miracle of geometric and textural subtlety; or the fearful, glassy-eyed
glare of three refugee babies captured through a slit between rough blankets; or the
silent labor of people dragging a mastless skiff over glossy sand under leaden skies,
an image screaming with Christian symbolism like so many of Mr. Salgado's
pictures. You would have to be blind or dead-hearted or immune to aesthetic
pleasure not to be at least occasionally bowled over by such improbable skill.

But by now it should go without saying that Mr. Salgado is astonishing. Still at issue
are what you might call the mechanics of his astonishment: the beauty part.
"Exploitation of compassion" is another phrase from the professor in Le Monde.
Should pictures of suffering ever be so beautiful?

Mr. Salgado's supporters have always responded that the beauty of the
photographs lends dignity to the people in them, which is a good point, but the
question demands a more elaborate answer.

It was one thing to try to wake humanity up to suffering in the world via photographs
from the early years of the last century through the golden age of photojournalism in
the 1940's and 50's, when most people saw distant places and learned of faraway
disasters through photographs, but it is another thing to try to do so now, when the
number of images that flash across television and computer screens diminishes the
value of any single image you may see. Photographers deal with this problem
differently, but above all by struggling to make beautiful pictures: what causes any
image to stick in the mind, aside from shock content, whose impact tends to be
brief, are qualities like pictorial integrity and compositional originality, which are
fancy terms for beauty. If your subject happens to be the dislocation of people and
their suffering, then those people and that suffering become your compositional
devices.

Beauty takes many guises. A decade ago, apropos of another show by Mr. Salgado
at the center, Ingrid Sischy in The New Yorker held up Walker Evans as a
preferable alternative, Mr. Salgado's work faring less well because of "the
unrelenting application of the lyric and the didactic to his subjects," while Evans was
appealingly mordant and clinical. It's an interesting point. Evans's iconic tenant
farmers are memorable because they do short- circuit pity by cutting out all charm
and anecdote. We stare level-eyed at people who squint back at us, refusing, as
Lionel Trilling once put it about Evans's famous portrait of Allie Mae Burroughs, "to
be an object of your `social consciousness.' " He added, "She refuses to be an
object at all."

But this neutrality rubs two ways. For another exhibition this year, the center
unearthed anonymous photographs of impoverished Southerners made in the 1930's
by eugenicists who wanted to prove the biological inferiority of the poor, and the
pictures looked shockingly similar in format and tone to Evans's.

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