Art
Jordan, Patrick
not have the compassion or the understanding to see that America is a heterogeneous society. I am sure that the same limited vision can be found in ward headquarters in an Italian or a black...
...These were followed by an essay on the photographer by Matthew L. Wald...
...In a photo of leprosy victims at a clinic in Chad (1985), exterior light from the right makes each face in the dark confines of the primitive waiting area distinct and discernible...
...Hope, humor, death, valor--they all have their distinct, honored place in this exhibit...
...Despite the weightiness of his subjects, Salgado's photographs are neither overwrought nor sentimental...
...Cardinal Franciszek Macharski, head of the diocese, also admitted that the process of educating Polish Catholics to the need would be slow and painful...
...The lamp of the body is the eye...
...This kind of scene is a natural in the theater and the audience inevitably roots for Sam's rebirth, but Gumey, as though he distrusts the sentimentality of the occasion, mixes Sam's speech with Bud's phone call to his wife in which the event is analyzed as it takes place...
...This is a sample of Gurney's playing with the realistic surface of his work, less flamboyant than the theatrical tricks in The Dining Room and Sweet Sue, but The Old Boy still comes across as too tidy, too predictable, too obviously moving toward those cleansing tears...
...The play is supposed to reopen elsewhere off-Broadway in the fall...
...Two years later the agreed-upon deadline passed without so much as ground having been broken...
...The beautiful fruit foreshadows a second, better Eden...
...At a Kenyan girls' school (1986), fog swirls around a circle of chanting, swaying students...
...She is draped in black, and but one eye shows...
...A Brazilian peasant (1983), stripped to the waist, holds his naked baby daughter next to a life-size portrait of Christ...
...Two clouds move unhindered in the background as the women ascend and descend a slope...
...They reveal something of God's own attention and abounding presence...
...In one photograph, an army of bodies ascends crude wooden ladders, ten across, twenty men deep, shoulder to foot, shoulder to foot, up from one landing in the Pueblo-like pit to the next...
...Worn out by sand storms and chronic infections, the eye has become nothing more than a withered, onion-like film...
...A worker welds the hull of a boat in Brest, France (1990...
...There is a particular emphasis on the rigors of work in the third world--Brazil, India, Ecuador, Bangladesh--and on life and death in the face of famine and civil war...
...And we...we will never be satisfied without his verdict...
...In 1984-85, Salgado worked with M~decins sans Frontidres covering the great famine in the Sahel...
...I do not make pictures to give anybody a bad conscience," he told Wald...
...And yet, each child's face is not overexposed but in proper contrast and focus...
...Salgado depends on natural light, and his skill in using it is superb...
...Viewing "An Uncertain Grace" is both exhausting and exhilarating...
...A piet~ without even the comfort of the corpse...
...I am sure that the same limited vision can be found in ward headquarters in an Italian or a black district here in my own Philadelphia, but that is not Gurney's subject...
...The diocese of Cracow, under whose auspices the center was to be constructed, requested an extension of the deadline, blaming the lack of progress on the difficulties of building anything under what was left of Polish communism...
...In another, six women in flowing saris and splendid headdresses clear a canal under construction by carrying the dirt out in wok-like pans balanced on their heads...
...From India (1990), a group portrait of three coal miners, blackcovered magi whose eyes search the inscrutable camera's eye for the star of deliverance...
...Mali, 1985: the Prodigal Son's mother...
...The nearly ninety black and white photographs rival the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson or Walker Evans...
...Eventually, in February 1987, an agreement was reached in Geneva...
...The Old Boy closed after a brief run at Playwrights Horizon when several of the performers were highjacked by a lush TV special on which Stephen Collins (Sam) will play John Kennedy...
...The three are joined...
...The exhibit opens with a 1986 series of photographs from Brazil's Serra Pelada gold mine...
...The characters tend to be stereotypes, but that is really only a problem with Perry's mother who, as Nan Martin plays her, comes through as the wicked witch of the West...
...The tag next to the photograph indicates the broader context: "In the Serra Pelada gold mine, each worker makes up to sixty trips daily, transporting bags of dirt from the bottom of the mine to the sediment dump on top...
...Salgado manages to be on the latest firing line...
...The New York Times Magazine (June 9) carried his photographs of oil-well firefighters in Kuwait...
...Salgado's photographs could easily do the same for Centesimus annus...
...His photographs from Ethiopia startled the world...
...They look simultaneously like tree ornaments and candles on an inverted Menorah...
...It happened here...
...Salgado's photographs, heightened by his composition and technique, are profoundly social...
...It stipulated that a center for "information, education, meetings, and prayers" would be constructed in the vicinity of Auschwitz, outside the heart of the camp, and that the nuns would move their convent into this new building...
...The girl sells small candied apples unaware of the woman's benevolent gaze...
...Both clouds and women seem to be dancing, albeit to different choreographies...
...Does this man still carry his burden...
...one woman, going down, extends an arm to another coming up...
...Like Cartier-Bresson and Evans, Salgado's subjects are people tested by events and made memorable by the artist's attention and discretion...
...It should not be missed...
...Mark O'Connor n 1984 eight Carmelite nuns received permission to open a cloister in an abandoned building on the border of Auschwitz...
...We see his protective goggles through the eye of a huge steel 12 July 1991:439 clip being attached to the hull...
...His gaze is that of an eternal judge, merciful but undistracted...
...When Pope John Paul II writes in Centesimus annus that "the human inadequacies of capitalism and the resulting domination of things over people are far from disappearing," he might have been providing a gloss on Salgado's photographs...
...Scarcely ever has a photographer rendered them so lucidly, so unforgettably, and under such circumstances as this forty-seven-year-old former economist who was forced to flee Brazil in 1968 for political reasons...
...The sun breaks through with full force from behind the tree, obliterating whole BOOKS sections where the foliage does not cover...
...But immediately, one confronts individuals in situations that reveal an essential element of their humanity: unself-conscious contemporaries, impervious to the lens of the camera but keenly attuned to Salgado's own humanity, seemingly enslaved by circumstance but generally unbowed...
...Man is made to live socially," he told Wald, "and photography is an instrument of this...
...The exhibit, which opened in San Francisco and moved on to The International Photography Center in New York, is now on view in Norfolk...
...Salgado's settings vary, from ritual to war, from survival to children's games...
...The problems...
...A Guatemalan woman (1978) watches a small girl, perhaps her daughter, from a small window within a door...
...But Salgado has immortalized him, much as Pablo Neruda did Cristobal Miranda and the sodium nitrate shovelers at Tocopilla...
...An appeal for money sponsored by a Belgian Catholic organization in the fall of 1985 brought the convent to the attention of European Jews...
...In a tree full of children in Thailand (1987), eight young boys swing from boughs in a Shaker-like tree of life...
...In July of '89 a group of Orthodox Jews from New York scaled the fence surrounding the convent, and proceeded to pray and blow horns in the inner courtyard as a protest against the continued presence of the Carmelites...
...PATRICK JORDAN Two peoples, two stories THE CONVENT AT AUSCHWITZ Wladyslaw T. Bartoszewski George Braziller, Inc., $17.95, 169 pp...
...Here, an Eritrean refugee, Giacomettilike, stands holding the limp skeletal form of his son...
...His indictment of class has special resonance since Sam's oldboy network once controlled--and still does to some extent--the levers of power in this country...
...For their part, the Jewish dignitaries who had negotiated the settlement, seeing no tangible progress, began to doubt that the church had ever intended to move the convent...
...Sometimes all the photographer gives is a series of legs and feet struggling to dig into a muddy slope...
...At first look, the shots of Serra Pelada seem like stills from a motion picture set...
...The man looks like a tribal chieftain cradling the last of his people...
...These appear as liberated zones where the sparks of primeval creation have been made manifest...
...There is not the slightest doubt...
...This in turn led to a longdistance, intermittent debate involving principally three interested parties: Jewish / international organizations, the Catholic international church hierarchy, and the Polish episcopate...
...His images are remarkably contemporary...
...1986...
...If your eyes are bad, your whole body will be in darkness...
...The Serra Pelada photographs are like Stations of the Cross...
...the grainy quality of the photograph makes the whole scene damp and windswept...
...Another photograph depicts an angular, mud-covered Sisyphus from above as he makes the top of the ladder, a bundle of slag strapped in a bag to his shoulders...
...It was at this point that confrontation replaced dialogue...
...In 1963, Pope John XXIII's Pacem in terris caused such a worldwide response that an edition of the text was published with Magnum photographs from around the world illustrating the text...
...Sam's self-discovery (after an angry denunciation by Alison) brings him to a speech that is a mea culpa for having failed Perry and to a collapse into tears which presumably wreck him as a viable candidate even as it opens him up as a human being...
...The grace in Salgado's photographs is anything but uncertain...
...It seems inconceivable...
...There is a keen, dramatic suspense in the moment: the man senses he might yet topple back eight stories into the pit below...
...it closes later this year in San Diego...
...Such scenes--masses of humanity laboring like insects in an open pit mine---could be from Land of the Pharaohs, but surely not A.O...
...Cultures are given their due...
...Despite his poverty, the peasant sees and is seen by God...
...I had never had the experience of standing before photographs and finding my flesh tensed almost to the point of twitching...
...He is concentrating on securing the final rung and then moving onto the ledge...
...They were forcibly removed by some laborers work440: Commonweal...
...Will they last...
...We can mind the problem of others and not be on the defensive about the problem...
...The look on the woman's face is not one of terror but of irreparable grief and separation...
...GERALD WEALES ART GRACE ABOUNDS SEBASTIAO SALGADO'S PHOTOGRAPHS 6 n Uncertain Grace" is a suggestive title, but it hardly captures the riveting photographic collection that makes up Brazilian photo journalist Sebastiao Salgado's first retrospective in this country...
...It is like a Mir6: a playful eye looking into the camera through a hole, the welding torch sending out a cascade of joyous fireworks...
...The white of his eye, at the center of the photograph, indicates the total effort of his concentration not to loose his grip...
Vol. 118 • July 1991 • No. 13
