When a dam burst in the city of Mariana, Minas Gerais, Brazil on November 5, 2015, it shocked the world.
It was an unprecedented tragedy: a torrent of toxic sludge covered the village of Bento Rodrigues, contaminating the Rio Doce (Doce River), killing 19 people, and causing other environmental damage whose consequences are still difficult to quantify. Unfortunately, this catastrophe was only one episode in the long history of extractivism that has been drastically altering the Brazilian landscape.
This dramatic event follows a legacy of exploitation of both land and people in the country. An 1888 photograph of Minas Gerais by Marc Ferrez shows five Black men working most likely under a regime of slavery in precarious conditions. This photograph, known as primeira fotografia do trabalho no interior de uma mina de ouro (first photograph of work inside a gold mine), is an early document in a dire story of human greed that extends to the present.
In Ferrez's photo, the faces of the five men are not visible. Marc Ferrez, a witness to their work, stands as a hidden and indifferent observer. The photographer, who recorded the major urban reforms and the construction of railway lines, bridges, and harbors in Brazil at the turn of the century, also produced numerous images of slave labor. In most of them, enslaved workers, like these five men in the mine, pose or reenact their activities in front of the camera. Ferrez sought to demonstrate that the institution of slavery in Brazil was not an obstacle to technological progress and to the industrialization of the country. In his photographic work, Ferrez shows no adherence to the anti-slavery movements of his time.
Ferrez was an enthusiast of new photographic technologies, with which he experimented extensively throughout his career. In order to capture the image of workers in the gold mine, Ferrez used an advanced technique that allowed him to make a photograph of great quality despite the low light. Nonetheless, the advances of photography contrasted with the crude and unhealthy work in mines that desecrated the land and dehumanized workers. Civilization and barbarism are, here, two sides of the same coin.
Landscapes: Above and Underground
Twenty years before taking the photo of the gold mine, Marc Ferrez became famous for his landscape photographs. His exceptional mastery of the photographic devices and the technical quality of his works quickly caught the attention of Emperor Pedro II—himself an amateur photographer and a great lover of the medium.
In 1873, after a fire in his studio, Ferrez went to Paris, where he acquired new equipment, including tools for taking panoramic photos. In 1875, Ferrez was invited by the emperor to join the Comissão Geológica do Império do Brasil (Geological Commission of the Brazilian Empire) alongside the Canadian-American geologist Charles Frederick Hartt. This scientific expedition aimed to discover and catalog the country's mineral diversity. Between 1875 and 1876, Ferrez traveled to states in the north and northeast of Brazil and produced around 200 photographs, which make up two photographic albums, both in Getty’s collection.
Ruinas de Palmyra, 1875–1876, Marc Ferrez. Albumen silver print, 7 9/16 × 9 15/16 in. Getty Museum, 86.XA.749.1.46
In the photograph above, a panorama sweeps across sedimented rocks, wild plants and a narrow strip of sky. Look closer, and five well-dressed Black people arise upon the mountain terrain, far removed from the drudgery of the plantations or the mines. They merge into the rough surface of the rocks and lose their individual identities, almost disappearing in the rugged and arid landscape. Ferrez uses these people as measuring instruments so that the observer can accurately examine the landscape's breadth. The human scale, paradoxically, dehumanizes them. Bereft of movement and expression, they seem petrified.
Thirteen years after the expedition, Ferrez regained interest in the texture of the stones and in the construction of landscapes, this time underground. In the upper right corner of the photograph in the gold mine, Ferrez captures part of the cave, enhancing the image’s sense of depth, which reveals his precision in choosing this specific point of view. Ferrez always takes the observer's gaze into account: here he seems to want to invite the viewer to access the tight, dark space of the mine. As in the photograph from the Geological Commission album, these five men also lose their identities and nearly disintegrate on the arid rock surface. Ferrez’s taste for rustic landscapes, ruins, fossils, and caves seems to resurface in his images of mining, slave labor, and the degradation of nature.
Centuries of Exploitation
Marc Ferrez took the Minas Gerais photograph in a decisive year for Brazil. In 1888 slavery was formally abolished in the country, making it the last Western country to do so. Ferrez, in photographing the transformation of the Brazilian landscape, paradoxically, dialogues with a long tradition of representing underground exploitation in the Americas. His photo of the mine echoes a long history of documenting the subjugation of Black Africans and the erasure of the indigenous presence in Brazilian territory.
In 1565, Italian traveler Girolamo Benzoni published La Historia del Mondo Nuovo, which narrated the exploitation of precious metals and enslaved people in the Americas. He wrote about how people were captured in Guinea-Bissau (under Portuguese domain) and transported to the Americas to work in the mines, replacing enslaved Indigenous workers.
Girolamo Benzoni (Italian, c. 1519–after 1572), xi. Nobilis et admiratione plena Hieronymi Bezoni Mediolanensis, secundae sectionis..., ed. Theodor de Bry (Frankfurt am Main, 1595), pl. I
In 1595, the Flemish publisher Theodor De Bry printed Americae pars quinta, a largely illustrated version of Benzoni's book. In this edition, he added an engraving showing Black men digging caves in the mountains, from which they extract metals to be deposited at the feet of nearby conquistadors. De Bry emphasized the contrast between the miners and the conquerors. The miners were naked, working, and on their feet, while the conquerors were seated and dressed. This made explicit the differences between exploited and exploiter. De Bry had never been to the Americas and had never witnessed the cruel reality he represented in his print. Three centuries later, Ferrez showed that Black workers continued to be subjected to forced labor in the mines.
Marc Ferrez's photography is one expression in an ongoing story of erasures, silencing, and the gradual death of the earth that provoked, more than a century later, the environmental tragedy in Mariana. “When the land is seen merely as a resource for industry, to be extracted for profit, we lose an important sense of our own interconnectedness,” Indigenous philosopher Ailton Krenak said in 2020. His community was directly affected by the contamination of the Rio Doce. “The Doce River, which we, the Krenak Nation, call Watu—our grandfather—is a person, not a resource,” he said. “The result of our divorce from our integrations and interactions with Mother Earth is that she has left us orphans—not just those termed, to a greater or lesser degree, Indigenous peoples, Natives, Americans, but everyone.”
