Made by MENDO
About the booksWho will recognize a great book better than a bookstore? A bookstore run by graphic designers. Here’s why: at MENDO we get market feedback seven days a week, we are blessed to be surrounded by a bunch of talented, inspiring people – photographers, writers and publishers – and after being a bookstore for more than 15 years, we can easily say we know what book aficionados are looking for. Don’t you agree that initiating, creating and realizing jaw-dropping books now, only comes natural?
A MENDO publication is a well-designed book with visually stunning creative content, browsed by people to be amazed and inspired. The subject-matter is one of our pre-defined curated categories, fashion, photography, interior, sport, lifestyle, food and traveling. In general, a MENDO book is a piece of furniture in itself.
A vast hole, some 200 meters wide and deep, teeming with tens of thousands of barely-clothed men
“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?”
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.
Sebastião Salgado
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.
‘I never saw editors react to any set of pictures as they did to Serra Pelada.’
‘I never saw editors react to any set of pictures as they did to Serra Pelada.’
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.