[Leica] Salgado . . . an interesting video

[Daniel Bowdoin <danlb@mindspring.com>]

This is just a quick note to recommend a very interesting video that I
recently purchased. It's entitled "Sebastiao Salgado: Looking Back at
You: A leading photojournalist's life and work", and it appears to be a
1993 BBC television production. It runs for an hour and is in color . . .
except, of course, for the color renditions of black-and-white images:-)
Interesting and actually quite informative, with a bent toward Salgado's
work in documenting the end of the era of manual labor. Salgado's English
is excellent and he is very articulate, though occasionally he is
speaking French with English subtitles. There are context-establishing
scenes (this is where the color part comes in) of some of the geographic
areas in which he has worked. But most interesting are the scenes of
Salgado actually working--shooting, editing, chatting with the workers
he's photographing, that sort of thing. He is, by the way, much younger-
looking in this video than he appears (to me, at least) in some of the
more recent photographs I've seen of him . . . even though not that many
years have passed in the meantime. 

One thing that may be of interest to some of the obsessive technophiles
here . . . there is a scene at his worktable where he opens his camera
bags and shows some of their contents. I know there was a thread a couple
of years ago about just which cameras and lenses Salgado regularly uses.
In the video, he pulls out two R6s, with 60mm macro and 28mm lenses, and
an M6 with a 35mm lens. He also shows a case with a long zoom, which he
seems to be mildly embarrassed to have and says he very rarely uses (1 or
2% of his negatives). If the scenes here and there throughout the video
are to be taken as actually representative of his working norms, then
Salgado appears to be primarily an R-Leica user, with the M-camera there
for special situations. 

In any case, perhaps some of you weren't familiar with the video and
would find it of interest. It seems to be available through most of the
usual internet outlets . . . I got my copy from Barnes and Noble.

Dan Bowdoin