- Sebastião Salgado and the Aesthetics of the Uncanny

Abstract

This text proposes an interpretation of the photograph Serra Pelada (1986), by Sebastião Salgado, through the lens of the aesthetics of feeling, as outlined by Sigmund Freud in Das Unheimliche (1919), a term translated into English as the Uncanny. The aesthetics of feeling brings into question the horror and anguish that arise from the body’s instinctual intensities. The origin of the uncanny lies in the emergence of familiar content that should have remained repressed. Drawing on Byung-Chul Han, we introduce the idea that the death drive is harnessed by capitalism in its relentless compulsion for accumulation—an effort to deny death. Cleanliness, smoothness, and polish represent the aesthetic ideal desired by capitalism as a way of disavowing the dying, the mud, toxic waste, and death itself. Serra Pelada generates discomfort and estrangement because it reveals something we would rather not confront: the deadly real.