What is it about a dull yellow metal that drives men to abandon their homes, sell their belongings and cross a continent in order to risk life, limbs and sanity for a dream? Sebastio Salgado When Sebastio Salgado was finally authorized to visit Serra Pelada in September 1986, having been blocked for six years by Brazils military authorities, he was illprepared to take in the extraordinary spectacle that awaited him on this remote hilltop on the edge of the Amazon rainforest. Before him opened a vast hole, some 200 meters wide and deep, teeming with tens of thousands of barelyclothed men. Half of them carried sacks weighing up to 40 kilograms up wooden ladders, the others leaping down muddy slopes back into the cavernous maw. Their bodies and faces were the color of ochre, stained by the iron ore in the earth they had excavated. After gold was discovered in one of its streams in 1979, Serra Pelada evoked the longpromised El Dorado as the worlds largest openair gold mine, employing some 50,000 diggers in appalling conditions. Today, Brazils wildest gold rush is merely the stuff of legend, kept alive by a few happy memories, many pained regretsand Sebastio Salgados photographs. Color dominated the glossy pages of magazines when Salgado shot these images. Black and white was a risky path, but the Serra Pelada portfolio would mark a return to the grace of monochrome photography, following a tradition whose masters, from Edward Weston and Brassa to Robert Capa and Henri...

Binding: Hardback;208 pages; Publisher: Taschen GmbH; Classification: AJB; Weight: 2406 g; Dimensions: 333 x 256 x 30

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