Old Photograph of Serra Pelada.Open Pit Mine

The photos yesterday of the gold mining in the Congo, Men Who Moil for Gold, reminded me of the Amazonian gold rush in the early 1980's where at Serra Pelada a mountain was leveled and then turned into a 100 metre deep pit by hand. The photographer Sebastião Salgado made his name with images from this mine. There was a documentary made of this gold rush but I can not find it. Maybe the other mining fans know the name of it. Here is a long (90 minutes) discussion of his work from the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

For even more information about Sebastião Salgado here is a documentary, Looking Back at You, on him and his work, (pt1, pt2, pt3, pt4, pt5 and pt6). In this documentary an art critic say that photos like the one above give him an idea what the construction of the Pyramids must of looked like.