Of course not. It is not just beauty that has the power to still or focus the mind. I have on a wall a photograph by Sebastião Salgado that is not beautiful in the traditional sense. It is an image of a gold miner climbing a rickety ladder in Serra Pelada, Brazil, carrying a heavy sack filled with mud on his back. He is clearly tired, suffering under the strain. The whole landscape is bleak, dystopic: a giant hole in the ground filled with hundreds, thousands of men filling cloth sacks and transporting them on their backs to a washing station in the hope that inside their load there will be a few specks of gold. It is an image that reminds me of the myth of Sisyphus, that speaks of the meaninglessness of life. There is nothing beautiful in this theme.

*A gold miner in Serra Pelada, Brazil. Photograph by Sebastião Salgado.*

And yet it enthralls me, captivates me to a point that it seems new even though I have seen it every day for the past twenty years. When I look at it I only see it – all others thoughts vanish. All feelings vanish, except the feeling the photograph transmits to me.

The purpose of art can be to give us pause, to make us think, reflect. Art can educate and instigate. By showing hate, art can instigate compassion; by showing despair, art can motivate hope; by showing pain, art can move people to seek or provide relief. By bringing hard topics to our attention, art can motivate us as individuals and societies to better ourselves, to solve problems.

I do strive to make my photographs beautiful, and that is because I wish to transmit through them the wonder I feel when I am in nature, when I look at a flower, a tree, or a mere blade of grass. I want people to have beauty on their walls so that they cannot imagine how it is to live without it. So that when they see beauty being destroyed, they will feel a compunction to rise up.

Thank you for reading.

Roberto Vámos

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