It has been almost a generation since Sebastiao Salgado first
published Exodus but the story it tells, of fraught human movement
around the globe, has changed little in 16 years. The push and pull
factors may shift, the nexus of conflict relocates from Rwanda to
Syria, but the people who leave their homes tell the same tale:
deprivation, hardship, and glimmers of hope, plotted along a
journey of great psychological, as well as physical, toil. Salgado
spent six years with migrant peoples, visiting more than 35
countries to document displacement on the road, in camps, and in
overcrowded city slums where new arrivals often end up. His project
includes Latin Americans entering the United States, Jews leaving
the former Soviet Union, Kosovars fleeing into Albania, the Hutu
refugees of Rwanda, as well as the first "boat people" of Arabs and
sub-Saharan Africans trying to reach Europe across the
Mediterranean ea. His images feature those who know where they are
going and those who are simply in flight, relieved to be alive and
uninjured enough to run. The faces he meets present dignity and
compassion in the most bitter of circumstances, but also the many
ravaged marks of violence, hatred, and greed. With his particular
eye for detail and motion, Salgado captures the heart-stopping
moments of migratory movement, as much as the mass flux. There are
laden trucks, crowded boats, and camps stretched out to a clouded
horizon, and then there is the small, bandaged leg; the fingerprint
on a page; the interview with a border guard; the bundle and baby
clutched to a mother's breast. Insisting on the scale of the
migrant phenomenon, Salgado also asserts, with characteristic
humanism, the personal story within the overwhelming numbers.
Against the indistinct faces of televised footage or the crowds
caught beneath a newspaper headline, what we find here are
portraits of individual identities, even in the abyss of a lost
land, home, and, often, loved ones. At the same time, Salgado also
declares the commonality of the migrant situation as a shared,
global experience. He summons his viewers not simply as spectators
of the refugee and exile suffering, but as actors in the social,
political, economic, and environmental shifts which contribute to
the migratory phenomenon. As the boats bobbing up on the Greek and
Italian coastline bring migration home to Europe like no mass
movement since the Second World War, Exodus cries out not only for
our heightened awareness but also for responsibility and
engagement. In face of the scarred bodies, the hundreds of bare
feet on hot tarmac, our imperative is not to look on in compassion,
but, in Salgado's own words, to temper our behaviors in a "new
regimen of coexistence."
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