Page 116 - BB_Textbook

Transcript: Sebastiao Ted Talk
https://www.ted.com/talks/sebastiao_salgado_the_silent_ drama_of_photography
I'm not sure that every person here is familiar with my pictures. I want to start to show just a few pictures to you, and after I'll speak.
photographer. But I did much more than that. I put photography as my life. I lived totally inside photography doing long term projects, and I want to show you just a few pictures of -- again, you'll see inside the social projects, that I went to, I published many books on these photographs, but I'll just show you a few ones now.
04:46
In the '90s, from 1994 to 2000, I photographed a story called Migrations. It became a book. It became a show.
04:55
But during the time that I was photographing this, I lived through a very hard moment in my life, mostly in Rwanda.
I saw in Rwanda total brutality. I saw deaths by thousands per day. I lost my faith in our species. I didn't believe that
it was possible for us to live any longer, and I started to
be attacked by my own Staphylococcus. I started to have infection everywhere. When I made love with my wife, I had no sperm that came out of me; I had blood. I went to see a friend's doctor in Paris, told him that I was completely sick. He made a long examination, and told me, "Sebastian, you are not sick, your prostate is perfect. What happened is, you saw so many deaths that you are dying. You must stop. Stop. You must stop because on the contrary, you will be dead."
05:57
And I made the decision to stop. I was really upset with photography, with everything in the world, and I made
the decision to go back to where I was born. It was a big coincidence. It was the moment that my parents became very old. I have seven sisters. I'm one of the only men in my family, and they made together the decision to transfer this land to Lélia and myself. When we received this land, this land was as dead as I was. When I was a kid, it was more than 50 percent rainforest. When we received the land, it was less than half a percent rainforest, as in all my region. To build development, Brazilian development, we destroyed a lot of our forest. As you did here in the United States, or you did in India, everywhere in this planet. To build our development, we come to a huge contradiction that we destroy around us everything. This farm that had thousands of head of cattle had just a few hundreds, and we didn't know how to deal with these. And Lélia came up with an incredible idea, a crazy idea.
07:08
She said, why don't you put back the rainforest that was here before? You say that you were born in paradise. Let's build the paradise again.
07:17
And I went to see a good friend that was engineering forests to prepare a project for us, and we started. We started to plant, and this first year we lost a lot of trees, second year less, and slowly, slowly this dead land
started to be born again. We started to plant hundreds of thousands of trees, only local species, only native species, where we built an ecosystem identical to the one that
00:49
I must speak to you a little bit of my history, because we'll
be speaking on this during my speech here. I was born in 1944 in Brazil, in the times that Brazil was not yet a market economy. I was born on a farm, a farm that was more than 50 percent rainforest [still]. A marvelous place. I lived with incredible birds, incredible animals, I swam in our small rivers with our caimans. It was about 35 families that lived on this farm, and everything that we produced on this farm, we consumed. Very few things went to the market. Once a year, the only thing that went to the market was the cattle that we produced, and we made trips of about 45 days to reach the slaughterhouse, bringing thousands of head of cattle, and about 20 days traveling back to reach our farm again.
01:47
When I was 15 years old, it was necessary for me to leave this place and go to a town a little bit bigger -- much bigger -- where I did the second part of secondary school. There
I learned different things. Brazil was starting to urbanize, industrialize, and I knew the politics. I became a little bit radical, I was a member of leftist parties, and I became an activist. I [went to] university to become an economist. I [did] a master's degree in economics.
02:21
And the most important thing in my life also happened in this time. I met an incredible girl who became my lifelong best friend, and my associate in everything that I have done till now, my wife, Lélia Wanick Salgado.
02:40
Brazil radicalized very strongly. We fought very hard against the dictatorship, in a moment it was necessary to us: Either go into clandestine anonymity with weapons in hand, or leave Brazil. We were too young, and our organization thought it was better for us to go out, and we went to France, where I did a PhD in economics, Lélia became an architect. I worked after for an investment bank. We made a lot of trips, financed development, economic projects in Africa with the World Bank.
03:12
And one day photography made a total invasion in my life. I became a photographer, abandoned everything and became a photographer, and I started to do the photography that was important for me. Many people tell me that you are a photojournalist, that you are an anthropologist photographer, that you are an activist
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