如今，在摄影被艺术世界和数字操纵吸收的情况下，萨尔加多的摄影作品具有一种《圣经》般的特质并投射出一种即时性，这些让他的作品具有生动的当代感。塞拉佩拉达（Serra Pelada）的矿山早已关闭，但紧张的淘金热大戏却从这些图像中跳了出来。

本书收集了萨尔加多拍摄的关于塞拉佩拉达的所有作品，这些作品用博物馆级的品质被复制出来，并附有萨尔加多撰写的一篇前言和艾伦•里丁（Alan Riding）的的一篇随笔。本书还出了签名的限量收藏版和艺术版。
“What is it about a dull yellow metal that drives men to abandon their homes, sell their belongings and cross a continent in order to risk life, limbs and sanity for a dream?” – Sebastião Salgado

When Sebastião Salgado was finally authorized to visit Serra Pelada in September 1986, having been blocked for six years by Brazil’s military authorities, he was ill-prepared to take in the extraordinary spectacle that awaited him on this remote hilltop on the edge of the Amazon rainforest. Before him opened a vast hole, some 200 meters wide and deep, teeming with tens of thousands of barely-

clothed men. Half of them carried sacks weighing up to 40 kilograms up wooden ladders, the others leaping down muddy slopes back into the cavernous maw. Their bodies and faces were the color of ochre, stained by the iron ore in the earth they had excavated.

After gold was discovered in one of its streams in 1979, Serra Pelada evoked the long-promised El Dorado as the world’s largest open-air gold mine, employing some 50,000 diggers in appalling conditions. Today, Brazil’s wildest gold rush is merely the stuff of legend, kept alive by a few happy memories, many pained regrets―and Sebastião Salgado’s photographs.

Color dominated the glossy pages of magazines when Salgado shot these images. Black and white was a risky path, but the Serra Pelada portfolio would mark a return to the grace of monochrome photography, following a tradition whose masters, from Edward Weston and Brassaï to Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson, had defined the early and mid-20th century. When Salgado’s images reached The New York Times Magazine, something extraordinary happened: there was complete silence. “In my entire career at The New York Times,” recalled photo editor Peter Howe, “I never saw editors react to any set of pictures as they did to Serra Pelada.”

Today, with photography absorbed by the art world and digital manipulation, Salgado’s portfolio holds a biblical quality and projects an immediacy that makes them vividly contemporary. The mine at Serra Pelada has been long closed, yet the intense drama of the gold rush leaps out of these images.

This book gathers Salgado’s complete Serra Pelada portfolio in museum-

quality reproductions, accompanied by a foreword by the photographer and an essay by Alan Riding.Also available in a signed and limited Collector’s Edition and as an Art Edition.