F4: The World in Pictures

In 1956, urban planner Lúcio Costa, embarked on a daunting task alongside Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer. They were entrusted to plan, design, and lead the construction of a brand new capital city for South America’s largest nation from scratch. Under the initiative of Brazil’s then-president Juscelino Kubitschek and his “Fifty Years in Five” program — which aimed to catalyze 50 years of progress and development for the country in only five — the two set out to realize a massive vision that would, in the hopes of its organizers, allow Brazil to forge a new, modern identity in the latter half of the century.

Although the city has continued to expand since its formal inauguration in 1960, those embryonic years and the sentiments surrounding them are a fascinating case study of human responses to the possibilities of the future. Fortunately, armed with a camera and profound ability to discern the sentiments of his time, the iconic Swiss photographer René Burri created pictures of the time which are both subtle artistic masterclasses and emotional time capsules.

The most prominent feature of Burri’s photos in Brasília is the clear use of distinct angles of elevation. Although photographers often vary the angles from which they take photos for individual images, it is rare that an entire project exhibits such a strong directionality in this regard. What this means is that with very few exceptions, there is a significant positive or negative angle of elevation between the camera and the subject of the image. Although this angle is primarily upward-facing — a technique Burri achieved by shooting close to the ground — there is also a collection of aerial images within the project that are unique in that they are both downward facing and, unlike all other images, in color.

Although The New Yorker criticized Sebastião Salgado’s photography during the Sahel famine of the 1970s claiming his “beautification … is a call to admiration, not to action,” very few of his images are beautiful. And unlike his later works, which became some of the most celebrated and widely known photography projects of all time, Salgado’s book “Sahel: The End of the Road” is neither mesmerizing nor captivating. In fact, the vast majority of its images, despite being compositionally elegant in Salgado’s trademark, highly saturated black and white style, make the viewer want to look away. Anybody who either appreciates art, feels compassion for the world, or both, should celebrate that distinction.

Before becoming the world-renowned photographer that he is today, Sebastião Salgado was a trained economist. During his time spent working for the International Coffee Organization in 1971 (a subject that he would later document at great length), he began taking photos. At first, he was merely a freelancer, but his desire to feel more connected to the people he knew only in academic contexts imbued him with the palpable empathy that defines his work today — a characteristic reflected by his emphasis on portraying the suffering of people who rarely have their stories told. Just over a decade later, working with the humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders, he began photographing a drought which tore through the lives of countless people across Africa’s Sahel region.

Sandwiched between Africa’s Sahara desert and savanna, the Sahel region has suffered a long history of droughts dating back to the 17th century. Between 1968 and the early 1980s, the period in which Salgado immersed himself, roughly 100,000 people died due to disease and food shortages. And although the subject matter is clearly worth documenting, the way Salgado chose to depict the famine's horrors attracted controversy.

I have always loved photography’s ethereal quality. I cherish the medium’s ability to turn reality into fiction and create a world of imagination from concretely real things. Several years ago, my parents gifted me a copy of National Geographic’s “Asia and Oceania: Around the World in 125 years.” My history-loving, faraway imagination was seduced by the book, transporting me to the mountains of Kashmir, ports of Victoria Harbor, and jungles of Bagan to live a multitude of lives I had never before conceived of.

Of the photographers represented in the compilation, one of the most notable is the American photographer Steve McCurry, who is most well known for his portrait “Afghan Girl,” a dazzling work which takes as its subject a green-eyed young Afghan refugee in the early 1980s. Despite its stunning composition, the photo has become highly controversial in recent years after some of McCurry’s coercive tactics, which he employed to make his subject Sharbat Gula pose for the photo, surfaced.

The public’s concern with the photo in recent times reflects a broader objection to photographic practices that can be interpreted as exploitative, such as projects which do not aim to accurately reflect a given reality but instead capitalize on its attraction to a foreign audience. McCurry’s larger body of work, which in some cases reflects this tendency, is nevertheless defining of a genre of photography that meaningfully contributes to the global photographic ecosystem. The work he did in Afghanistan is a clear example of why.

“I'm not interested in truth,” Israeli photographer Nadav Kander told LensCulture in an interview over a decade ago. In a way, it was a strange comment for a photographer to make, but it was also an ultimate show of respect for the complexity of his subject.

Kander was referencing his recent project “Yangtze – The Long River,” in which he captures the unseen humanity of China’s most vital waterway amidst the nation’s rapid period of rapid economic development. This development, which began under Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s and continues in the present day, has lifted 800 million people out of poverty and constituted “the fastest sustained expansion by a major economy in history,” according to the World Bank. Still, Kander wanted to understand how this unprecedented upheaval affected ordinary Chinese citizens, which led him to make five trips to the Yangtze River over the course of three years, following it all the way from the mouth of the river to its source on the border of Tibet.

Kander implies that photography is a poor means of objectivity, preferring to use it to interrogate the world’s emotional depths. As such, it is only subliminally that his work tells the purest truth about China in the modern era: that for its millions of displaced people, the pace of modernization comes at an immense personal cost. Now, as the nation’s current property crisis unearths old questions about the relationship between development and belonging, Kander’s three-year journey along Asia’s longest river is as much a window into the present as it is to the past.