Mary Fletcher
This program was repeated in June 2025 because the Brazilian photographer Sebastian Salgado died in May aged 81.
It was preceded by an Omnibus showing his vibrant pictures of manual labour. The Arena program shows Salgado ‘ in conversation’ with John Berger although it’s more that they speak in turn.
The photography is impressive and shows people from various locations forced by the vagaries of capitalism into becoming migrants, desperate to find security for themselves and their families. Salgado spent years researching, meeting the people, editing to choose the most expressive and emotive photographs, and he speaks movingly in imperfect English with apparent sincerity.
What I don’t like about the program is everything that isn’t Salgado undiluted. There’s woozy romantic sad music. There’s John Berger reading poetry and making obscure remarks. The movie camera zooms in on the images and shots are overlaid, emerging from this obscuring artiness when I want to view the still photographs calmly in their stillness as Salgado took them and printed them and selected them for his book. His aim is to make us aware of these migrations and to question the political and economic system that causes them.
He asserts that in this system only one in four people benefit. The film maker intersperses movie shots and words from people about their plight.
There are unfortunately no statistical facts to back up this vision but it is powerfully convincing in its repetitive relentless pictures of desperate looking refugees, beautifully captured in black and white.
Nor is there any political thought or theory about how to change capitalism. That’s left to us to undertake.
It’s great to learn about the photography of this committed man Sebastiano Salgado. But it’s not helped by this Arena programme’s style and approach.
Salgado: the Spectre of Hope – Arena, bbc, directed by Paul Carlin, 2001
