the wonderful Salgado expresso cups

Where does the profit from the sale of these cups go? I walked into an Illy shop last year and the salesperson who pointed out the cups to me had no idea if a percentage of the proceeds went to support Salgado’s efforts.

maybe to him, maybe to poverty?!?

maybe to him, maybe to poverty?!?

Weird on both counts. Canon, “The choice of little plastic men.”

‘salgadobucks’,coming to every high street soon.

Silly as the cups may be, you might all want to take a look at the ad campaign and consider how Salgado pulled off yet another financial/documentary coup. Did any of you happen to look at the photo essays connected with each country? Click on the links and you will see a wonderful series of documentary images about how coffee is produced (the back lit pix are gorgeous). Would Time, Mother Jones, Paris Match or Stern pay you to do this? No. Salgado gets the results he does because (1) he patiently works with total concentration on one project to the exclusion of others; and (2) he knows how to find people to fund these projects, whether by parceling out bits of his project to different magazines, or by finding corporate sponsors who will fund his vision. Now, you may not want to get into bed with a big corporation, perhaps you are too purist for that, but these days you have to admit that there are basically three routes available to you and each has its limitations. One, the magazines: very few assignments are long enough to allow you to really dig in, so at best the assignments only allow for bits and pieces, plus the pay is low and they are unlikely to hire you to work on stories like these. Two, grants and awards, which are too competitive and limited both in terms of the money awarded and the amount of awards given so you cannot depend on them (how many will have applied for the new FFF grant? 500? And how many will get it? 1.) Three, corporate or commercial campaigns, which admittedly rarely allow for this kind of extensive coverage, but the pay is very very good, and think of how many people will see this series: it is a travelling show, an ad campaign, a web presentation, and a “cup” series! Say what you will, Salgado is a cagey guy who knows how to work the system to his advantage, and I for one find his example very instructive. There is a danger here, of course, obviously. Salgado skirts it by working for a company that putatively pays well for its coffee beans (though, in fact, we are still talking about pittance). Mattias’s ironic comments are justified, but i wouldnt automatically dismiss this thing.

Barry, supporting Salgado’s efforts is besides the point. He doesnt need the coffee cups for that. He was paid, I am sure, quite well, and he got a great series of pix to show for the effort. Take a look and you will see.

Jon,

Perhaps I was not clear about supporting Salgado’s efforts. By that I meant supporting the causes and organizations that Salgado supports with his projects. Very often proceeds from his photographic projects go to organizations such as Mèdecins San Frontiéres.

If such is the case with the coffee cups I will buy a few.

Ah, gotcha. But those projects you speak of are always specifically directed at the initiative he is working for at that moment, and this appears to have no other purpose than to support Illy. By the way, despite the focus on Brazil, India and Ethiopia, I believe that Illy also buys its beans from here; the taste is unmistakeable. Italians know their coffee.

The sanctimonious Family of Man-style rhetoric that feathers Salgado’s exhibitions and books has worked to the detriment of the pictures, however unfair this may be (There is much humbug to be found, and ignored, in declarations made by some of the most admirable photographers of conscience.)

Salgado’s pictures have also been sourly treated in response to the commercialized situations in which, typically, his portraits of misery are seen. But the problem is in the pictures themselves, not how and where they are exhibited: in their focus on the powerless, reduced to their powerlessness.

It is significant that the powerless are not named in the captions. A portrait that declines to name its subject becomes complicit, if inadvertently, in the cult of celebrity that has fueled an insatiable appetite for the opposite sort of photography: to grant only the famous their names demotes the rest to representative instances of their occupations, their ethnicities, their plights.

Taken in thirty-nine countries, Salgado’s migration pictures [a different exhibition than mentioned above] group together, under this single heading, a host of different causes and kinds of distress. Making suffering loom larger, by globalizing it, may spur people to feel they ought to “care” more. It also invites them to feel that the suffering and misfortunes are too vast, too irrevocable, too epic to be much changed by any local political intervention. With a subject conceived on this scale, compassion can only flounder – and make abstract…

susan sontag’s words,not mine.

Jon,

i completely agree with a lot of what you’re saying. Where i completely disagree with is the logic Salgado’s using. Once you cut through the self-promotional sanctimonious drivel, you realise he’s using the cofee farmers to advertise a coffee company, not a coffee company to advertise the plight of the coffee farmers. And the hypocrisy in that is what makes it unbearable. I’m more than enthousiastic about using corporate ressources to do documentary : in fact, an ad gig for a swiss watch company is what initially allowed me to go to Iraq (yes, i shot a watch ad in Um Quasr), but only as long as the relationship is balanced – it’s about giving back to the people you photograph, not only those who feed you. And yes, of course Illy is a less worse alternative to Nestlé, but they’re still no bleeding-heart philantropists , which makes not mixing genres a necessity, as much for their credibility as for Salgado’s.

eSSSSSSSSSSSS-bloody-presso….. not eXpresso, GET IT RIGHT…... sorry, pet-hate of mine! Bully for Salgado. He was, after all, an economist, wasn’t he? From Brazil, more to the point!

Paul my eSSSSSSSSSSSS-bloody-presso…is tax deductible . Coffee cups get your own mug(self portrait) that you have snapped shoved on a mug or just give the proceeds to someone or anyone

paul,
you are absolutely right,salgado was an economist,he worked for the World Bank.which might explain his ability to move so fluidly in the corporate corridors of power.

salgado is undoubtedly a committed,honest photographer.his work has drawn much needed attention to a lot of marginalized issues.in this respect i am of the opinion that 'every little helps', "all publicity is good publicity", and other pertinent cliches.and for this i applaud salgado.(although no more i applaud anyone else who does the same).

however,if you take the corporate dollar directly there is always a payback.surely a fair proportion of the good done by his work is negated by using his work to clean up the images of the various corporations he works for.by making them appear concerned and caring he is actually supporting the very machine his is calling for to be dismantled.that is a parodox bordering on hypocrisy.

maybe these coffee cups are an indication that he has spent a bit to much time and energy cultivating the corporate boys,and some of their ethics have started to rub off on him.

now i am off for a large turkish coffee,lots of sugar,no milk.although when i want the italian version i too will order an eSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS-presso.

Salgado was an economist for the International Coffee Organisation, not the World Bank.

he worked for the ICO on missions to africa affilliated to the World Bank.

“the problem is in the pictures themselves, not how and where they are exhibited: in their focus on the powerless, reduced to their powerlessness.
It is significant that the powerless are not named in the captions. A portrait that declines to name its subject becomes complicit, if inadvertently, in the cult of celebrity that has fueled an insatiable appetite for the opposite sort of photography: to grant only the famous their names demotes the rest to representative instances of their occupations, their ethnicities, their plights.”

I am not sure I entirely buy this Michael, though it’s a point worth discussing, because it raises the problem about how PJ imagery reduces people to abstractions or categories, rather than humanize them in their plight. However, to be honest, I never liked Sontag’s critique of photography and I think she is making a serious error in critical thinking here both because she is generalizing the case (fallacy of composition) and is guilty as well of what the Marxists would call unmediated thinking. To assert complicity between celebrity photography and photojournalism is nothing more than a rhetorical shotgun wedding. Her writing is full of these rhetorical sweeps, but upon examination they fall apart. I mean, I have pix of sugar workers that bear the name of the workers, I spent time with them, I got to know them. Does the pic succeed in escaping this dilemma, if dilemma there be, simply because it bothers to name the subject? Is the picture of a nameless man starving to death in his barrack any less human for lacking the name of the starving subject? Should I have not have taken the picture because I didnt have time to get to know the guy? Sontag is full of “bushwa”; and I mean it: she is very much a bourgeois liberal critic, and I find some of her writing is full of mealymouthed sanctimonious cant as is Salgado, who certainly does deserve this criticism at times. For the record, I do agree somewhat with her assessment of Migrations—I never did quite understand the logic behind forcing together so many different kinds of human movements under one category. They are all migrating, and – - – ? Migrations as a broad theme just doesnt work in the same way as Labor or Work does. He made a mistake there, it seems to me.

Matthias, I figured you would chime in with that, and I agree with you. Herein lies the trap of this kind of thinking or MO. Humanism in the service of the marketplace cannot manage to extricate itself from the coils of an inherent contradiction: capitalism depends entirely on the exploitation of labor. Illy or Benetton or any other company that wishes to project an image of benevolence can never wholly escape the charge that its own practices, however necessary in terms of providing employment or an outlet for the resources of developing nations, are nonetheless based on an unequal economic relationship of power, and while such companies may genuinely treat its employees well or pay fair prices for the raw materials they export from poor countries, they will always be nothing more than an overseer with a carrot instead of a stick (and your citation of the article on coffee beans is a good illlustration of the fact that raw materials or commodities exist in a precarious market and are rarely if ever properly compensated. Certainly the case with sugar). Not to mention the fact that humanistic pieties served up in an ad campaign are basically reduced to hypocritical cant, because though it tries to hide the fact by focussing attention on some “issue”, the campaign is ultimately nothing more than an attempt to bring the company’s name to one’s attention and thus sell more of its product. Just as you say, Matthias, once you cut through the drivel, you realize that “he’s using the coffee farmers to advertise a coffee company, not a coffee company to advertise the plight of the coffee farmers.” I would amend that to “they.” I think I would have been all right with this campaign if, instead of trying to dress it up as a plea on behalf of the workers, it simply presented the material as the story of coffee production. I suppose that would still beg the question, but at least it wouldnt be quite so obviously open to the charge of hypocrisy. “as long as the relationship is balanced – it’s about giving back to the people you photograph, not only those who feed you.” I imagine Salgado has given back much, but in this case that still doesnt quite work does it? I am not sure that the formula quite solves the problem for us. Even putting aside the corporate pay aspect, I am not sure that what I do really gives much back to those who form the subjects of my photographs in any concrete terms. How has my picture of Jean François cutting cane helped Jean François?

As to your last comment Michael, I also agree; it is a real problem, and when all is said and done Salgado is a liberal humanist and is thus open to the charges laid at their door by the Marxists all through the 20th century. And as I continue to mull it over this morning, I will do so with my espresso coffee (made from beans picked by migrant Haitian laborers) sweetened by amazingly rich “crema” (brown sugar made from cane cut by migrant Haitian laborers) without which I cannot start my day.

i agree about susan sontag,she talks a lot of absolute bollocks about photography,most of the time. maybe unwittingly i feel she makes an interesting point about naming people.the way the press operates today,with its obssession with celebrity,is distorting our views of what constitutes newsworthiness. jumping laterally,putting a name to people we photograph is a good habit for us,as photographers.it means we have to have real,personal contact with our subjects,and surely that is usually a positive thing.

now i have to go and prepare myself to watch englands inevitably embarrassing,(but hopefully successful!) appearance at the world’s biggest press junket,the ‘coupe du monde”. no more coffee,alcoholic anaesthetics only from now on in.

I personally find so faulse those captions with name and age of the subjects living in extreme situations as if in this way you pretend to humanize them: giving these superficial details when actually you are there just to shoot and report an injustice, spending only a few days/hours, writing in your notebook age and name of the subject and taking the picture but you don’t really know them and they sure don’t bother neither of their own ages or names. Why this aberration??

I agree when you are doing a documentary story and you go deep and spend your time with your subjects ‘cause you create an intimacy, a friendship with the story and its subjects.

...the tasting of an Illy espresso is just as great as the looking of Salgado’s pictures

dana you have yet to taste the espresso I make here! If you ever visit, I promise I will put Illy to shame. And I agree with you, the naming gambit is a sham, though Michael’ s larger point bears reflection.

A few years ago I visited saharawy refugees in south algeria, and when i asked to my subjects their ages, they used to laugh at me, “who knows”, they said, write what you think. and then those situation when your subject don’t want to give the name, and you just have to use another one … just because you need to give humanity …

All this is so confusing. All I wanted to know was what kind of expresso cups to buy. I guess, for the momment, I will stay with my Paris Hilton cup and saucer set.

Ah, you know you raise a great point there, Dana, there are in fact cultures where naming doesnt bear the same weight as it does in the “West” (wherever that is, really), and has entirely other values and connotations. I completely forgot this. For example, here in DR: first of all, when you meet someone here for the first time you ask their name, but it is their “apellido” (surname) that really counts, because the next question invariably is, “oh, arent you the cousin of fulano who lives at the corner of Mella con Bolívar in the green house? I know your family.” Family relations are the means whereby an individual here achieves a meaningful identity. Your social existence and significance is largely dependent on your relation to a social unit. Moreover, individual characteristics do not generally obtain in one’s name: Juan Fulano is probably known individually by his apodo (nickname), which usually is a description of a character trait or physical trait that distinguishes him as an individual. I am known as the Sabioloco, for example (and also as el gringo bachatero). Others have colorful names like “bebeleche” (a famous murderer, he was), or “la Soga” (a policeman who used vigilante tactics to cut down on criminals on his beat), or “hacha negra”, or my favorite “califuiche” (Assface), a peon from our country village. So if I were to humanize my subjects here by naming them in captions I would have to do so by using their nicknames. In fact I did this once in a story about homeless people in NYC, and Margaret Morton from Cooper Union, who publlished a book of photos on the architecture of shantytowns criticized me for doing so. The guy was called “mad mac” and she objected that this was offensive. However, it was in fact the name by which he was known in that shantytown and it did in fact describe his situation quite well! so much for liberal PC thought.

Actually I would very much like a Paris Hilton cup and saucer!

Well Jon, should we ever meet we will drink your espresso in my cups and saucers.

So, where does this rule come from? Is it an Associated Press rule?

By the way, i used to do the anagramme of my name, and from time to time i changed; and now my real name is loredana, but for the spanish is too long, and they call me lorena, loreana or whatever, so i just shorten it with dana but i am still the same …

Dana, I would bet that you know this, but for some of the others it is worth quoting: “For the beginner there are many possibilities, for the expert there are few. So, you should always maintain your beginner’s mind.”—Sunryu Suzuki

everyone envious of salgado’s achievements please raise your hands :) (both of mine are raised :0)

Mine are raised too. Let me tell you I have made a serious study of his career, and I still pay attention to whatever he does and that is why the coffee ad campaign struck my fancy. I am serious considering approaching the Melo company or the santo Domingo brand to see if they would pursue a similar project. ¡uepa!

I am envious of Barry’s Paris Hilton cup and saucer set! My sister who lives in New Guinea is down for a visit, has brought a gift some coffee fresh from the highlands… now THAT’s coffee!! If only I had a Paris Hilton cup and saucer set to enjoy it in…......

The Paris Hilton cup is great because her head is empty and you can fill it with whatever you like ;-) but seriously, who’s to say that these things are going to sell anyway? Growing up in Vermont I lived through a bunch of Ben & Jerry’s “Save the rainforest” type campagins that all eventually dissapated into nothingness, is this a proven business model?

“the tasting of an Illy espresso is just as great as the looking of Salgado’s pictures” i would rate salgado as much better than a mass produced,generic product.as a brazilian i think a better comparison would be to ronaldinho.a very talented performer who is also a beneficiary of our societies need to lionise certain individuals.both salgado and ronny are very good at what they do,but they are not as far above the rest of their colleagues as the fame machine likes to place them.

If you pick coffee beans for a living, you’re probably very happy that Mr. Salgado has taken up your cause. At best, his work is another installment in the trend toward fairer pricing and free-trade boutique coffee in the last decade or so—after the world price of coffee plummeted, committing thousands of people to misery.

You should admire Salagdo for working the system from the top to the bottom, as well as from the bottom to the top. Too much documentary photography just presents desperate people and stops there. At least Salgado builds from scratch an entire infrastructure of sponsorship and distribution of his work on a global scale. Think about that for a second.

It’s easy enough to shoot pictures of coffee growers, All you need is a camera and a plane ticket. That’s the easy part. If you believe in your own work, that your documentary photography is important, that it can bring some benefit to the people you are shooting, then you should be a good steward of it. Building an infrastructure for that purpose is something Salgado has done on his own. The other biggies like Nachtwey are a Time magazine franchise. Salgado understands something about the global economy, the media, the distribution of content, advertising, and corporate social responsibility. I say we should all learn from his efforts.

So back to the original topic, yeah Preston I agree and I like the way you phrase it: building an infrastructure around the project. nice way to think about it. I still have some doubts about using ad campaigns in this manner, or at least I dont want to completely ignore the potential problem therein, but I dont want to dismiss it outof hand either. well, Food for thought. but definitely one thing about Salgado we could all learn from is how he manages to steward (another good word!) through the market and other forms of distribution. Believe me, I have been thinking about this over and over, and have begun, in a small way, to imitate him. The OSI documentary dist. grant was a first step.

Salgado, admittedly, has superb editorial contacts and a solid rep that commands editors’ attention, but we can all work toward that even if we dont get a lucky break like being on hand to cover the attempted assassination of Reagan. More than that, however, I think it is his sustained work on longterm projects that has helped him, and i firmly believe in that approach.

With all of the resources at Salgado’s command, the coffee project strikes me as a commercialization of humamistic photography of the worst sort, pandering to an industry that wants to improve its public image, while whoring himself as some sort of moral authority. This is an annual report cloaked in the garment of photojournalism and undecuts everythimg that a serious journalist should stand for. At least Philip Jones Griffith and Bruce Davidson didn’t use their names to confer some sort of “truth” to the annual reports they did. This is an advertorial of the worst sort, and apologists who admire his “business model” are just falling into the same trap.

For all this Salgado worship, is there any word on what good his “humanistic” photography has done? That’s an honest question, for all I know he donates 90% of all that $$ to charities. But through the years all I see are advances in myth-building and grandiose coffee table books. He seems to have basically one theme, the romanticization of poverty. Personally I’d rank him as a good photographer with a great printer, and above all a marketing phenomenon. Photographically, however, I would expect more really from all those resources. Take away the fantastic printing and do the photos hold up the myth? I’m not convinced.

how come you are not a Salgado then?!

I guess nobody told me that’s the goal. What’s your excuse?

I guess nobody told me that’s the goal. What’s your excuse?

Dave,

I’m kidding. Salgado is a genius for making the cliché picture. But I will take a Koudelka photo over a Salgado any day! He should photograph in color!

Davin,

Glad to hear that was in jest, I’m rather sensitive about not being Salgado. But then, the Dalai Lama says sometimes not getting what you want can be an amazing stroke of luck.

Yes, Koudelka is amazing. Without starting another Towell debate, his book The Mennonites is also out of this world.

Yes, I just watched the quicktime video of Mennonites on magnuminmotion. . .

And what about that Dali Lama—smiling all the time with all the suffering going on in the world. What a jerk.

I have only one word.

‘Bennetton’

why? does salgado work for them as well? i can’t wait to buy a pair a pair of kangaroo skin trousers emblazoned with tasteful pics of child labour in the far east.they’ll look great with my nikes.

Well as to Benneton, that company is behind the new Fabrica Forma Fotografia grant and website. Does that mean the winner’s images will be used in a new line of bright orange and green leisure wear?

Does anyone know if Canon sponsored the war photographer action figure? C’mon people get back to work!!.

lets hope so.

Does anyone know if Canon sponsored the war photographer action figure? C’mon people get back to work!!.

Have just stumbled across this thread, and am still pissing myself laughing about the action figure!
Why does he have a TV remote sticking out of his pocket, and you just have to love the beard – he looks like Captain Birdseye as a young man!
Bet he has a few fish fingers in his back pocket for when he’s chewing on the heals of GI Joe in a firefight and it looks like they won’t
get back to the Baghdad franchise of Burger King!

Oh yeah, Michael Bowring might want to change the tense of his statement about Sontag talking a load of bollocks most of the time as she shuffled
off this mortal coil about eighteen months ago – doesn’t do much talking at all now.

I agree I get a kick out of the action figure. The first person to introduce it to LS was Johann Spanner who used it for his bio pic during his first (?) tour of baghdad. But you pegged it, he does look a lot like Capt Birdseye.

No need for any tense changes; it is accepted practice to talk about dead writers in the present tense when we refer to their works. I guess because the words are still with us.

Jon, I will defer to your greater knowledge on the subject – clearly both Sontag and I talk a load of bollocks!
Curious though why that should be the practice. After all, we do not say that Dali “paints” surreal pictures, but “painted”.
Similarly for sculptors, actors, musicians – indeed, even poets who are no longer with us “wrote” rather than “write”.

In the meantime I am wondering whether the action figure has eagle eyes and gripping hands!! Oh, how I miss my youth!!

michael,
your point is?

I think the action figure does in fact have gripping hands!

As for the use of the past or present tense, this is the rule: When we are speaking about the content of a dead artist’s (or critic’s) work, we use the present tense: “In his Demoiselles d’Avignon, Picasso paints a lyric blah blah blah”; but if we are talking about the act of painting, writing or whatever, then we use the past tense, logically: “In his Demoiselles d’Avignon, Picasso painted one of the earliest examples of cubist art . . . ” Same with writers. Course you can come up with examples where the distinction is not clear, but this has been a convention of critical discourse for eons. sorry, it is the old English prof in me coming out. Back to bashing Salgado (though I for one dont entirely agree with the bashing).

Depending on which way you decide to make the argument you can easily become dillusional, that is, in the extremes. Of course it is a given that personal contact, direct intervention, and direct assitance is better than the opposite extreme, but you are crazy if you think knowing someone’s name means you know there ‘soul.’ And that is the big problem I have with Sontag and the Rest of the Liberal mouthwash-berkley-elite, is that they aren’t looking for souls, they are looking for something else, and frankly I haven’t ever found truth in the critique or their path(that’s not to say I haven’t found knowledge). We will get into scary territory, in my personal opion, if we as photographers, observers, journalists (all different things) begin to think by slapping a name in a caption that we have lended legitimacy and created personal intimacy with our subjects.

Although it has been said many times, I remember Nachtwey saying it specifically; ‘I think images pass through the part of your brain where words are formed and hit something more visceral. ‘

But what the hell does that mean? I don’t think it can be expressed in words. All I know is that I have felt love but I could never describe it to you in words. The same for hate. Can a picture do that to you? I think it can.

Depending on which way you decide to make the argument you can easily become dillusional, that is, in the extremes. Of course it is a given that personal contact, direct intervention, and direct assitance is better than the opposite extreme, but you are crazy if you think knowing someone’s name means you know there ‘soul.’ And that is the big problem I have with Sontag and the Rest of the Liberal mouthwash-berkley-elite, is that they aren’t looking for souls, they are looking for something else, and frankly I haven’t ever found truth in the critique our their path(that’s not to say I haven’t found knowledge). We will get into scary territory, in my personal opion, if we as photographers, observers, journalists (all different things) begin to think by slapping a name in a caption that we have lended legitimacy and created personal intimacy with our subjects.

Although it has been said many times, I remember Nachtwey saying it specifically; ‘I think images pass through the part of your brain where words are formed and hit something more visceral. ‘

But what the hell does that mean? I don’t think it can be expressed in words. All I know is that I have felt love but I could never describe it to you in words. The same for hate. Can a picture do that to you? I think it can.

Yeah, good-o…. now, where can I get myself a set of these bloody cups??!!

Paul, I had planned to send you my Paris Hilton cup and saucer but the cup broke when I was boxing it. Apparantly, it has as little substance as Paris herself. Now what? Back to the old enamel coated iron mug?

That’s one of those (rare) posts that can easily never end. Do you know why? Because it isn’t about photography, it’s about what we understand as photography.
Are you a Salgado’s fan? you have a zillion of arguments to support your point. Do You think Salgado is an opportunist who uses poverty as a plataform
to build his body of work? Maybe you can have another zillion of arguments… But it doesn’t matter at all. Life, world, big companies,
harvesting coffee workers, photography and Salgado’s work, all of that exists despite the labels we stick to them. I do know that photography without
thinking doesn’t work, but the same for thoughts without photography. Do we have a great and original vision on photography? Excellent, now let’s go out
there and photograph it, put it on paper! Otherwise, it would be better to join Sontag’s blah-blah club…

Well, even Susan Sontag had to put it on paper…. hmmm, we are so screwed….

Sorry about the blah-blah club. It was an unavoidable joke with the bang-bang club. I do recognize the importance of Sontag’s work for the intelligence of
the XX century; despite the fact that I do or don’t agree, her work is real. And it’s all that matters.