Exodus, or an imagined political community: the landless workers movement and internal migration in the work of Sebastião Salgado

Abstract

The objective of this essay is to analyse the photographic production of Sebastião Salgado of the Landless Workers Movement, aiming at understanding the relationships between the photographic medium and the levels of movement revealed by the images. It investigates how such images portray a “nation”, fragmented and heterogeneous, from the representation of a migrant community. Refusing to migrate to Brazil’s big cities, the Landless Movement accentuates its peripheral nature. Such aspect of resistance from this group is the focus of Salgado’s photographs. Nevertheless, as it is argued throughout the essay, there is a definite tension between “being represented” and “representing itself”: the Landless Movement, because of its political essence, reinforces the importance of photography in the art of “making history”.