DOCUMENTARY ANALYSIS

Documentary Analysis

Documentary Analysis

Introduction

Sebastião Salgado's work is not for the faint of heart. His photographs deliberately provoke and disrupt; they are not easy to look at because they are not supposed to be easy to look at. With a clever combination of distance and intimacy, Salgado personalizes human suffering. We are accustomed to hearing the numbers—10 people killed in a car bombing, hundreds dead in mudslides, entire villages ravaged by food shortages—but Salgado forces us to see the people, the wrinkled skin of poverty, the bent shapes of hard labor. His pictures are often disturbing because to personalize suffering is to make it horribly banal: isolation, poverty, exploitation, marginalization, and even genocide are part of everyday life in most of the modern world. These subjects are not easy to look at, Salgado argues, because those of us looking usually go to such lengths not to see them.

One would think that taking pictures that people find hard to look at would be a bad career choice for a photographer, but Salgado's work has touched millions of lives and made a real difference to society.

Discussion

The MST was formed in the early 1980s by rural poor throughout Brazil who were struggling over access to land.3 Supported by local churches and a dense network of cultural and social ties, movement activists organized new recruits to occupy properties characterized by the Federal Constitution as “idle” and not fulfilling their “social responsibility to be productive.” In the mid-1990s, 10 years after it was formed, the MST's actions had pressured the Brazilian government to create hundreds of land reform settlements throughout the country, but the movement was still largely unknown; its members were the poorest of the poor and were regularly subjected to violent intimidation and repression—both formal and informal. New recruits took their lives—as well as all their possessions—into their hands when they joined.

Then, in 1995 and 1996, two brutal massacres occurred in the northern region of the country. In the first case, MST members squatting on public land were cut down by gunmen while sleeping in their makeshift tents, and in the second, 19 people were shot execution style in the back of the head by off-duty military police as they marched along the highway to the state capital. In both cases, the gunmen fired indiscriminately, killing men, women, and small children with seeming indifference.

The massacres were officially dubbed “localized incidents” carried out by renegade individuals, but they sent a shudder down the collective spine of Brazilian society. A year after the second massacre, MST leaders organized a march to commemorate, condemn, and mobilize. Over a thousand movement members set out in February 1997; they walked in single file along the road from three different locations within Brazil to the country's capital. It took them two months, walking 20 kilometers a day, stopping at schools, city buildings, and churches along the way to hang out their hammocks and give public talks about the movement and the paradoxes of landlessness, poverty, and hunger in a country with so ...