Gold mine of Serra Pelada, state of Pará, Brazil, 1986. © Sebastião Salgado.
In this conversation, Sebastião Salgado and Alan Riding delve into Salgado’s TASCHEN Collector’s Edition book, Gold, a portfolio of his photographs from the 1980s gold rush in Brazil.
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. Blocked by Brazil’s military authorities for six years, Salgado finally gained access to the mine in 1986, resulting in this portfolio of photographs that hold a biblical-like quality and project an immediacy that makes them vividly contemporary. The mine at Serra Pelada has been long closed – kept alive by a few happy memories and many pained regrets – yet the intense drama of the gold rush leaps out of these images
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