Galeano On Salgado: 5

From Eduardo Galeano's "Salgado, 17 Times":

5. Salgado's photographs, a multiple portrait of human pain, at the same time invite us to celebrate the dignity of humankind. Brutally frank, these images of hunger and suffering are yet respectful and seemly. Having no relation to the tourism of poverty, they do not violate but penetrate the human spirit in order to reveal it. Salgado sometimes shows skeletons, almost corpses, with dignity all that is left to them. They have been stripped of everything but they have dignity. That is the source of their ineffable beauty. This is not a macabre, obscene exhibitionism of poverty. It is a poetry of horror because there is a sense of honor.

In Andalusia I was once told of a very poor fisherman who went about peddling shellfish in a basket. This poor fisherman refused to sell his shellfish to a young gentleman who wanted all of them. He offered to pay the fisherman whatever price he asked, but the fisherman refused to sell for the simple reason that he took a dislike to the young gentleman. And he simply said to him:

"I am the master in my hunger".