September 8, 2003 -- The University of Utah’s 2003-2004
Tanner Lecture on Human Values will be given by world-renowned
humanitarian photojournalist Sebastião Salgado on Tuesday,
Sept. 23, at 8 p.m., in the University of Utah’s Gardner
Hall, located on Presidents Circle. Salgado’s lecture, “Art,
Globalism, and Cultural Instability,” is free and open to
the community.
The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, founded by University of
Utah scholar and philanthropist Obert C. Tanner, are given each
year at Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Michigan,
Berkeley, Stanford and the University of Utah, where Tanner lectured
for 29 years.
“The committee is honored to present on the University of
Utah campus one of today’s most accomplished photographers
to speak about globalism, its outcomes and its unintended results
for local peoples,” notes Susan Miller, professor of English
and chair of the Tanner Lecture committee. “Salgado’s
work, beautifully rendered images of terrible human suffering,
illustrates how art can affect public opinion and provoke debate.”
Brazilian-born Salgado, who has won more than 50 international
awards for his work, documents in stark black-and-white photography
the fundamental dignity of all humanity while simultaneously protesting
its violation by war, poverty and injustice. His artistic images,
which he calls “very long-term stories,” are as diverse
as Vietnamese fishermen, orphaned Sudanese children, famine in
Sahel, Africa, and agrarian protests in Brazil. In chronicling
the lives of the world’s dispossessed, he has filled more
than nine books and many more exhibitions. In April 2001, Salgado,
now 59, was appointed as a UNICEF Special Representative.
“More than ever, I feel that the human race is one,”
Salgado writes in the introduction to his book Migrations.
“ There are differences of colour, language, culture and
opportunities, but people’s feelings and reactions are alike.
People flee wars to escape death, they migrate to improve their
fortunes, they build new lives in foreign lands, they adapt to
extreme hardship. . . .”
Salgado completed coursework for his Ph.D. in economics at the
University of Paris and worked as an economist for the International
Coffee Organization, a growers’ advocacy group, until 1973.
After borrowing his wife Lélia’s camera on a trip
to Africa, in 1973, he decided to work in photography, which launched
his career in art and social action. He worked for several agencies
and, from his base in Paris, was dispatched to document events
in Mozambique, Portugal and Niger. He covered the wars in Angola
and the Spanish Sahara, the taking of Israeli hostages in Entebbe
and the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan, coverage
that brought him into the public eye.
Salgado eventually began to pursue more personal, extended documentary
projects, including Other Americas (1986), an exploration
of peasant cultures and the cultural resistance of Indians and
their descendants in Mexico and Brazil; Sahel: L’Homme en
Détresse (Sahel: Man in Distress, 1986), a documentary
on the dignity and endurance of people in their deepest suffering;
Workers (1993), a documentary shot in 26 countries about
the end of large-scale manual labor; Terra: Struggle of the
Landless (1997), about those fighting to reclaim their land
in his native country of Brazil; and Migrations and The
Children (2000), both about the plight of displaced persons,
refugees and migrants in 41 countries. Among the many awards he
has received for his work are the W. Eugene Smith Award for Humanitarian
Photography (1982), ICP’s Photojournalist of the Year (1988),
and the Alfred Eisenstaedt Life Legend Award (1998.) In 1994 Salgado
founded Amazonas Images with his wife and collaborator Lélia
Wanick Salgado, who has designed most of his books. He is based
in Paris.
Several other events, all free and open to the community, will
be held in conjunction with Salgado’s upcoming lecture.
Tanner Lecture Panels
“Activist Art and Social Change,” a panel discussion
and workshop tour of the exhibit will be held Monday, Sept. 22,
from 3 until 5 p.m., at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts at the University
of Utah. The event will begin in the museum’s Dumke Auditorium.
Participants will include Ken Light, curator of the Center for
Photography at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University
of California Berkeley and author of Texas Death Row
(1997), Delta Time (1995), and Witness In Our Time:
The Lives of Social Documentary Photographers (2000), and
Fred Ritchin, professor of photography and communication at New
York University, a former picture editor of The New York Times
Magazine (1978-82), author of In Our Own Image: The Coming
Revolution in Photography (1990 & 1999), and co-author
of An Uncertain Grace: The Photographs of Sebastião
Salgado (1990).
Another panel discussion, “Globalism: Changing Cultures
in a Global World,” will be presented on Tuesday, Sept.
23, from noon until 2 p.m., in the Marriott Library’s Gould
Auditorium. The panelists will be Shifra M. Goldman and Lewis
Gordon. Goldman is a research associate and teacher at the Latin
American Center, UCLA. Her publications include Contemporary
Mexican Painting in a Time of Change (1981) and Dimensions
of the Americas: Art and Social Change in Latin America and the
United States (1994). She has also written for the Los
Angeles Times. Gordon, 2002-2003 fellow at the Wallace Stegner
Center for Land, Resources and the Environment and a University
of Utah adjunct professor of law, was the managing partner of
the law firm that represented the plaintiffs’ steering committee
in the Exxon-Valdez case. His recent work includes briefs for
the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on behalf of indigenous
peoples and environmental defenders.
Tanner Lecture Events
The Utah Museum of Fine Arts will present “Terra: Photographs
by Sebastião Salgado,” from Sept. 5 to Nov. 9. Museum
hours are 10 a.m. until 5 p.m. on weekdays and noon to 5 p.m.
on weekends. The exhibit, comprised of 20 photographs, documents
rural Brazilians’ attempts to retain their land, as well
as the brutal outcomes of that struggle. Salgado’s images
emphasize the right of all people to be treated justly, regardless
of economic or social status.
As part of public programming surrounding the photographic exhibit,
Amnesty International will feature the film Strong Roots:
The Landless Worker’s Movement in Brazil (Raiz Forte)
as part of its film festival in the Utah Museum of Fine Arts Dumke
Auditorium, on Sept. 13, at 3 p.m.
Two community photography exhibits will be held in conjunction
with Salgado’s visit to campus.
With the sponsorship of Pictureline and the U’s Bennion
Community Service Center, photographs and commentary by third
graders from Parkview Elementary School, in Salt Lake City, will
be displayed in honor of Salgado’s work, from Sept. 15 through
Oct. 3, in the University’s Bailey Hall, located in the
Architecture Building.
An exhibit of environmental photography by Salt Lake City West
High students and participants in the Department of English’s
Family Literacy Center, will be held in the U’s Union Gallery,
from Sept. 15 through Oct. 3.
A screening of the film The Spectre of Hope will be held
on Wednesday, Sept. 24, from noon until 2 p.m., in the Marriott
Library’s Gould Auditorium. The film documents an intimate
conversation between Sebastião Salgado and art and photography
critic John Berger about Salgado’s Migrations collection
of photographs. The short film will be followed by a closing discussion.
The University of Utah seeks to provide equal access to its programs,
services and activities for people with disabilities. Reasonable
prior notice is needed to arrange accommodations. For more information,
please call 801-581-7095.
