Paradise found

There have been a few instances during my short lifetime that have had a dramatic impact on my photography. The principal one, of course, was getting my first camera but another key moment came while lying on the green carpet of my parents’ lounge when I was a teenager. It was here, propped up with a cushion under my elbows, that I consumed the Sunday papers, and here that I first saw pictures by Sebastião Salgado. The colour supplement had a significant section devoted to an astonishing project that depicted what looked like scenes from Dante’s Inferno, as muddied bodies carrying great sacks of dirt climbed rickety long ladders made of branches as they made their way up the wet muddy walls of a mine. The hole they emerged from must have reached to the centre of the Earth, and these bustling sinners took their eternal punishment packed together in astonishing numbers as they lumbered under the weight of past deeds. These were, of course, the legendary pictures Salgado took in 1986