“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, after being banned for six years by the Brazilian military authorities, he was unprepared to witness the extraordinary spectacle that awaited him on this remote hill at the edge of the Amazonian rainforest. Before him was a vast pit, approximately 200 meters wide and deep, filled with tens of thousands of men. Half of them were carrying bags weighing up to 40 kilograms up wooden ladders; the others were jumping back down muddy slopes into the basin. Their bodies and faces were pale, stained by the earth's iron they had extracted. After gold was discovered in one of the streams there in 1979, Serra Pelada sparked the promise of El Dorado as the largest gold mine in the world, employing approximately 50,000 workers under appalling conditions. Today, Brazil's wildest gold mine is merely a legend, keeping alive some happy memories and many bitter regrets — and Sebastião Salgado's photographs.

When Salgado photographed these images, color dominated the glossy pages of magazines. The black-and-white path was a daring choice, but the Serra Pelada portfolio would mean a return to the grace of monochromatic photography, following a tradition of its masters, from Edward Weston and Brassaï to Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson, who had defined the early and mid-20th century. When Salgado’s images reached The New York Times Magazine, something exceptional happened: there was complete silence. “In my career at The New York Times,” recalls photo editor Peter Howe, “I have never seen editors react to any set of photographs as they did to Serra Pelada.” Today, with photography absorbed by the art world and digital processing, Salgado's portfolio holds a biblical quality and projects an immediacy that makes them vividly contemporary. Mining at Serra Pelada has long since ceased, yet the intense drama of the gold mining emerges from 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.

INSTITUTE TERRA

Founded in 1998 in Aimorés, in the state of Minas Gerais, Instituto Terra is the culmination of the enduring activism and work of Lélia Wanick Salgado and Sebastião Salgado as cultural documentarians. Through a scientific program of planting and nurturing seedlings, the organization has achieved remarkable reforestation of a once arid area and has furthered the Salgados’ mission to reverse the damage done to our planet. TASCHEN is proud to achieve carbon-zero status through our ongoing collaboration.

Also available in a signed and limited Collector’s Edition.

Pages: 208, Year of Publication: 1117, Dimensions: 24.8x24.8cm