The Gold Mine, Serra Palada, State of Para, Brazil

Name/Title

The Gold Mine, Serra Palada, State of Para, Brazil

Entry/Object ID

2005.47

Description

"The Gold Mine" is from a series Salgado produced in 1986 titled ?Workers: An Archeology of the Industrial Age? in which he documented manual labor worldwide. This particular image portrays workers in Serra Pelada, an open-top mine in the Amazon region of Brazil. As many as 50,000 garimpeiros, or diggers, scrape soil from the bottom of the mine, fill their sacks, and lug their loads which weigh between 65 and 130 pounds up the 1300 feet of wood and rope ladders. The workers are paid an average of twenty cents per load, which is then sifted for gold. Garimpeiros earn an annual income of approximately $2,000. Since the unemployment rate of unskilled workers in Brazil is very high there is a continual supply of labor for these types of operations.

Acquisition

Notes

Collection of DePaul Art Museum

Made/Created

Artist

Salgado, Sebastiao

Date made

1986

Ethnography

Notes

Brazil South America, Brazil

Lexicon

Legacy Lexicon

Class

PHOTOGRAPHS

Dimensions

Dimension Description

image

Width

50.8 cm

Length

60.96 cm

Exhibition

Realism and Magic: Latin American Photography from the Collection of DePaul University

Interpretative Labels

Label

The Gold Mine, Serra Palada, State of Para, Brazil Salgado, Sebasti?o 1986 "The Gold Mine" is from a series Salgado produced in 1986 titled ?Workers: An Archeology of the Industrial Age? in which he documented manual labor worldwide. This particular image portrays workers in Serra Pelada, an open-top mine in the Amazon region of Brazil. As many as 50,000 garimpeiros, or diggers, scrape soil from the bottom of the mine, fill their sacks, and lug their loads which weigh between 65 and 130 pounds up the 1300 feet of wood and rope ladders. The workers are paid an average of twenty cents per load, which is then sifted for gold. Garimpeiros earn an annual income of approximately $2,000. Since the unemployment rate of unskilled workers in Brazil is very high there is a continual supply of labor for these types of operations.