Sahel: The End of the Road (review)

Whichever way you approach it, this is a deeply affecting book. You may well feel a sinking sensation in the pit of your stomach, like heavy turbulence. You may find yourself taking unexpectedly long daydreams into nowhere as the immediate concerns of your day suddenly take on a desperate triviality. You may catch yourself giving out deep, long, heavy breaths, as you slowly summon the will, not to move on to another page, but to leave the agony of the one you are with.

The people that inhabit the photographs in this book are residents of a world in perpetual twilight, where the sun's rays, struggling to reach the ground, hang like threads on a loom. People and landscape merge–both are textures of a place without places. For this, as the book suggests, is the Sahel, and these people are above all citizens of an environment rather than a society or culture. They're presumably not all at the end of the same political road of neglect, but as creatures of an environment, they may as well be.

Watch the hands. Hands that caress the dying, deliver a baby, wash the dead, that hold weak limbs. White medical hands. Hands that wrap and make bundles, of the dead and living. And on the back cover a problematic choice: 'the healing touch' of a white doctor lit strongly as if from a divine presence above. She is Dorothée Fisher, one of three named people in the photographs, all of them medical staff.

Salgado's 15 month project to document the 1984-85 famine culminated in the publication, in France, of the book Sahel: L'homme en détresse, and then in 1988 a Spanish version Sahel: El fin del camino, both versions (as with this one) raising funds for Médicins sans Frontières, the humanitarian aid agency whose work the photographs circle around ceaselessly. But far from being restricted in their relevance to a particular crisis some twenty years ago, their power increases with each lesson not learned, each situation that is neglected and thrust into the media headlines once more. In 2005 images of the famine in Niger resonate with those of Salgado's, and, as Fred Ritchin notes in his introduction, "ask many of the same questions."

The refined elegance of this book, designed by Salgado's wife Lélia Wanick Salgado, and the third in UCP's Series in Contemporary Photography, exists in a superficially uncomfortable relationship to its subject matter. But then, submerged in a mellifluous visual sea, the inherent beauty of the images are finally revealed to us as a betrayal. Caught in a troubling dialectic between form and content, aesthetic pleasure and emotional turmoil, these images gain their activation.

An uneasy proximity. We sit beside the dying, within their shelters, beside the grieving. We might reach out and hold a hand; we catch eye contact, hesitantly. Salgado's camera does not seem to intrude, but how can this be? Are there ethical codes about doctor-patient relationships, something we hold dear in Europe or America, being thrown aside because this is Africa, a famine? Or are these not patients but victims, artistic forms that describe in their chiaroscuro the essence of human suffering? Or is the assumption that a comparison of cultural contexts is incommensurable? Eduardo Galeano's claim in the Afterword that in these images Salgado "does not pick off the vulnerable" and "reveals the secret splendor of human dignity" is a curatorial slight of hand that does not acknowledge the possibility of alternative indigenous responses. What have the people of the Sahel made of these images? How do they interpret these images some twenty years afterwards, and is there a perception that they have helped, as Salgado intended? Or do they resent images that portray them in only one modality, that of physical suffering?

As ever, there is the problem of the relationship between photograph and text. This is rarely solved satisfactorily. In this case the decision was made to...