Your Shopping Cart

Your shopping cart is empty!

Discover our bestsellers
Subtotal0 Items0
Go to Shopping Cart
XXL
XXL books are a minimum 39 cm (15.4 in.)

Sebastião Salgado. Gold

1000Edition: EnglishAvailability: 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 signed edition gathers the complete black-and-white portfolio in impeccable, grand-scale, museum-quality reproductions.

Collector’s Edition (No. 101–1,100), each numbered and signed by Sebastião Salgado
Edition of 1,000Hardcover in clamshell box, 45 x 41 cm, 10.15 kg, 196 pages, numbered and signed by Sebastião Salgado
“The mine at Serra Pelada is now closed, yet the intense drama of the gold rush leaps out of these images.”
Alan Riding
XXL
XXL books are a minimum 39 cm (15.4 in.)
Sebastião Salgado. Gold

Sebastião Salgado. Gold

1000

In Serra Pelada with Sebastião Salgado

Salgado’s portfolio of the Brazilian gold rush in a signed monograph

“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 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 signed and limited Collector’s Edition is the first monograph gathering the astonishing portfolio in full. In grand-scale, museum-quality reproductions, the images are interlaid with transparent paper and printed with cutting-edge High Definition Skia Photography technology. The result is nothing short of breathtaking, like an exhibition in book form.

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.

Collector’s Edition of 1,000 copies (No. 101–1,100), each numbered and signed by Sebastião Salgado.

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 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
Edition of 1,000Hardcover in clamshell box, 45 x 41 cm, 10.15 kg, 196 pages, numbered and signed by Sebastião Salgado

ISBN 978-3-8365-7650-5

Edition: English
Download product images here
0 Ratings

No reviews have been posted for this item yet. Be the first to rate this product.

Other editions