Your Shopping Cart

Your shopping cart is empty!

Discover our bestsellers
Subtotal0 Items0
Go to Shopping Cart

Sebastião Salgado. Gold

60Edition: Multilingual (English, French, German)Availability: In Stock
For a decade, Serra Pelada evoked the long-promised El Dorado as the world’s largest open-air gold mine, employing some 50,000 diggers in appalling conditions. Today, Brazil’s gold rush is merely the stuff of legend, kept alive by a few happy memories, many pained regrets—and Sebastião Salgado’s photographs. This collection is a major document of modern history and an extraordinary photographic portfolio.

Also available in a signed and limited Collector’s Edition
Hardcover9.8 x 13.0 in.4.85 lb208 pages
“In his staggering images of the Serra Pelada gold mines, Salgado documented the limits of human endurance – and revived black and white reportage.”
The Spectator
“The mine at Serra Pelada is now closed, yet the intense drama of the gold rush leaps out of these images.”
Alan Riding
Sebastião Salgado. Gold

Sebastião Salgado. Gold

60

Salgado's dramatic account of the Brazilian gold rush

Haunting black-and-white photographs of biblical dimension

“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?” – Sebastião Salgado

When Sebastião Salgado was finally authorized to visit Serra Pelada in September 1986, having been blocked for six years by Brazil’s military authorities, he was ill-prepared 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 barely-clothed 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 long-promised El Dorado as the world’s largest open-air gold mine, employing some 50,000 diggers in appalling conditions. Today, Brazil’s wildest gold rush is merely the stuff of legend, kept alive by a few happy memories, many pained regrets—and Sebastião Salgado’s 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 Brassaï to Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson, had defined the early and mid-20th century. When Salgado’s images reached The New York Times Magazine, something extraordinary happened: there was complete silence. “In my entire career at The New York Times,” recalled photo editor Peter Howe, “I never saw editors react to any set of pictures as they did to Serra Pelada.”

Today, with photography absorbed by the art world and digital manipulation, Salgado’s portfolio holds a biblical quality and projects an immediacy that makes them vividly contemporary. The mine at Serra Pelada has been long closed, yet the intense drama of the gold rush leaps out of these images.

This book gathers Salgado’s complete Serra Pelada portfolio in museum-quality reproductions, accompanied by a foreword by the photographer and an essay by Alan Riding.

INSTITUTO TERRA

Founded in 1998 at Aimorés in the state of Minas Gerais, Instituto Terra is the culmination of Lélia Wanick Salgado and Sebastião Salgado’s lifelong activism and work as cultural documentarians. Through a scientific program of planting and raising saplings, the organization has performed a miraculous reforestation of the once infertile region and furthered the Salgados’ mission of reversing the damage done to our planet. TASCHEN is proud to reach carbon zero status through our continued partnership.

Also available in a signed and limited Collector’s Edition

The photographer and author

Sebastião Salgado began his career as a professional photographer in Paris in 1973 and subsequently worked with the photo agencies Sygma, Gamma, and Magnum Photos. In 1994, he and his wife Lélia Wanick Salgado created Amazonas Images, which is today their studio, and exclusively handles his work. Salgado’s photographic projects have been featured in many exhibitions as well as books, including Sahel. L’Homme en détresse (1986), Other Americas (1986), Terra (1997), Migrations (2000), The Children (2000), Africa (2007), Genesis (2013), The Scent of a Dream (2015), Kuwait. A Desert on Fire (2016), Gold (2019) and Amazônia (2021).

The contributing author

Alan Riding is a Brazilian-born British author and former long-time foreign correspondent for The New York Times. Having served as the paper’s bureau chief in Mexico, Brazil, and France as well as its European arts correspondent, he is now writing for the theatre. A resident of Paris like Sebastião Salgado, the two have been friends and collaborators since the early 1980s.

The editor and art director

Lélia Wanick Salgado studied architecture and urban planning in Paris. Her interest in photography started in 1970. In the 1980s, she began to conceive and design the majority of Sebastião Salgado’s photography books and all of the exhibitions of his work. 

Sebastião Salgado. Gold
Hardcover24.8 x 33 cm2.20 kg208 pages

ISBN 978-3-8365-7508-9

Edition: Multilingual (English, French, German)
Download product images here

5.0

/5

67 Ratings

Awesome Book

Zoltan,November 12, 2021
It is beautifully printed as are all of his other books and it includes images that Workers does not have. A masterpiece, and a must for any collection of photographic reportage and art.

Surreal place

Maxime,November 6, 2021
It is incredible for Sebastao Salgado to have succeeded to take so many pictures of an unic place like this mine and that each of them is art.

Salgado's masterpiece

Axel,November 6, 2021
Powerful black and white photos of gold miners. Impressive number of people in the mud, exhausted, just for a little gold, all this is very moving thanks to the eye and the technical mastery of Sebastiãa Salgado.

The best!!

GILBERTO J.,November 5, 2021
Incredible content and high quality printed, by the best Sebastiao Salgado!

Gold by Salgado

Stephanie,November 4, 2021
His books are more than stunning photographies, it's an experience. And Gold was even more emotional for me, as a jeweler it was like being teleported to the gold mines. I'm a huge fan of his work!