Next week I am taking my yearbook class to see Exodus by the world-renowned Brazilian photojournalist Sebastião Salgado. It is an exhibit of over 300 photographs taken over a six year time period of migrants and refugees all over the world.
Exodus contains five sections and presents the story of the global movement of populations at the end of the millennia. In each section, images dramatically depict the unprecedented circumstances in which millions now find themselves, helping us grasp both the tragic plight of refugees and their resilience and dignity in the face of hardship.
I have prepared my students for this visit in the hopes that they will come away with not only an appreciation of the art of photography and the work involved in photojournalism, but an awareness of this plight of refugees in our world.
Salgado on Exodus
An extraordinary journey through photography
“I was born in 1944 on a farm in the rural state of Minas Gerais in Brazil. When I was five, my father moved to the small town of Aimorés; in my teens, I went to Vitória, the capital of Espírito Santo state, to finish high school and attend university.
After meeting Lélia Deluiz Wanick, who became my wife and later the curator of my shows and designer of my books, we traveled to the metropolis of São Paulo where I continued studying to become an economist. Every step was a move into a denser urban world. Then, in 1969, with Brazil under military rule, we left Brazil for Europe and found ourselves to become part refugees, part immigrants and part students.
Three decades later, we still live in a foreign land. It is not surprising, therefore, I should identify myself with exiles and migrants—people who shape new lives for themselves far away from their native countries. A Salvadoran waiter in a Los Angeles restaurant, a Pakistani shopkeeper in the north of England, a Senegalese worker on a Paris construction site—all these people share the same experience and deserve our respect. Each has traveled an extraordinary journey to reach where he is now; each is contributing to the re-organization of humankind; each is implicitly part of our story. In human history people have always migrated but something different is happening today. For me, the current population upheaval across the world represents a change of historical significance.
We are undergoing a revolution in the way we live, produce, communicate, and travel. Most of the world’s inhabitants are now urban. We have become one world. However, in distant corners of the globe, people are being displaced for essentially the same reason.”
—Sebastião Salgado on EXODUS
Deanna Dee-Dee Taylor 