Coastal Traveler - Summer 2008 - (Page 24)

coastalart SebastiãoSalgado Fettermangallery $35,000 for Train Station, Bombay. This massive print hangs above the desk of Peter Fetterman in his Bergamot Station gallery. The shot is from Sebastião Salgado’s book Migrations, which documents a worldwide peasant migration from rural towns to mega cities. Call Fetterman at 310.453.6463. 2525 Michigan Ave, Santa Monica www.fettermangallery.com Not everyone in California is well-off, but even the homeless here live better lives than their peers in Calcutta. The First World is a small bubble of consumptive prosperity and civil rights. Much of the rest of the world lives in abject poverty and filth, like the favelas of Brazil, where children wade through shit and sift garbage. Within the First World bubble is an even tinier microcosmos: the skinnydipping, goat-milking, free-thinking alternate universe of coastal California. If the human migratory path is from the forest to the city slum, the people who live in these villages are counter-migrationists. Agricultural subsidies from the European Union, Japan, and the United States have made rural life all but impossible in many parts of the world. West Africa has the most fertile soil for cotton — dark and wet. Yet West African villagers can’t sell their cotton above their price of production because the United States massively subsidizes irrigated cotton farming in the California desert. So farmers move to the city. Every village of the world is now lit by the glow of satellite televisions hooked to car batteries; there is nothing more alluring than the pop and sizzle of cosmopolitan life, of short shorts and Fanta. Sebastião Salgado spent seven years photographing the rural exodus in thirty-nine countries. The son of a Brazilian cattle rancher, Salgado became an economist after earning his Ph.D. He decided to become a photographer after borrowing his wife’s camera on a trip to Africa. Salgado was elected into the prestigious Magnum Photos agency, where he stayed until 1994, after publishing Workers, which gorgeously captured Dickinsonian conditions. Migrations documents the movement of 120 million people a year who move from village to city. Coastal villagers fly into the headwind of this migration, battling their way from cities to small refuges of wilderness, turning off their televisions. They are undomesticated humans who have lost their habitat and fled to the Wild Animal Park. Better, they think, to inhabit an artificially maintained museum piece of oceanfront forest than none at all. Better to have a Muir Woods with roped trails than no old-growth redwoods at all. And it is good to travel among the undomesticated, the heretics and eccentrics, the black sheep and maladjusted, the wild entrepreneurs of life, than spend one’s days among those who are gluttonously happy, shuttling between work, tract home and mall. 24 coastaltraveler summer http://www.fettermangallery.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Coastal Traveler - Summer 2008

Coastal Traveler - Summer 2008 Contents Coastal Connoisseur Coastal Picks Coastal Art Coastal Flyer Coastal Sex Coastal Eco Coastal Surfer Coastal Adventurer Coastal Snaps San Diego La Jolla Laguna Beach Malibu Santa Barbara San Luis Obispo Big Sur Carmel Monterey Santa Cruz San Francisco Sausalito Mill Valley Stinson Beach Bolinas Olema Point Reyes Station Fairfax Inverness Marshall, Tomales Sebastopol Petaluma Sonoma Coast Redwood Coast

Coastal Traveler - Summer 2008

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