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.