Sebastiao Salgado – master of monochrome, chronicler of the depths of human barbarity

Occasionally, we encounter an image that seems so ludicrously out of kilter with the modern world that we can only flounder in antiquity for appropriate descriptions. We see a black and white photograph that shows a swarm of tiny figures, ant-like in their relentless pursuit of some mysterious purpose around the edges of a dark, cavernous maw, and we say it’s biblical, epic, ancient.

We invoke the building of the pyramids, the Tower of Babel or Dante’s Inferno. Our artistic sensibilities might point us towards the darker paintings of Jan Brueghel the Elder or the apocalyptic waxwork tableaux of Gaetano Zumbo. What we seldom imagine is a 1980s Brazilian gold mine.

Gold, the new book from the Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Salgado, presents a hefty sequence of these staggering photographs. They were taken in 1986 at the Serra Pelada gold mine, a vast pit of despair and hope that for a decade sucked in gold-thirsty prospectors from across Brazil, a modern day El Dorado that created a handful of millionaires and devastated a landscape.

Salgado’s images record the monumentality of this extraordinary environment, a mountain inverted by shovels to become a monstrous, manmade hole, and the fortitude of the men who worked in those brutal conditions.

The biblical aura of the wide images — seething congregations of anonymous, half-stripped men shifting interminable burdens up unfathomable ladders — continues in the iconography of details. One man wears a hat of palm leaves that has frayed into a crown of thorns, another leans against a crucifix-like structure at the lip of the hole: Christ reborn on a Brazilian Golgotha. The effect is strangely humanising, transporting these individuals into a more familiar story.

Salgado stayed at Serra Pelada for 35 days in 1986. Photographing the miners as part of a global project entitled ‘Workers’, his ambition was to record the working class, in all their incarnations, before they ceased to exist.

Serra Pelada itself was on old story by the time of Salgado’s visit.