ACCLAIMED Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Salgado went to the Serra Pelada goldmine in northern Brazil in 1986, the year of its closure, and 18 months on from the demise of the murderous military dictatorship which had ruled the country for 21 years and controlled the mine.

Salgado arrived unprepared for what he saw: “Every hair on my body stood on edge,” he commented. “The Pyramids, the history of mankind unfolded. I had travelled to the dawn of time.”

The photographs he took, now available in the Taschen book Gold, record a crater with walls covered in scenes that Dante’s Inferno or the hellish paintings of a Botticelli or Bosch could only approximate.

A colossal hollow teems with tens of thousands of men who,  Sisyphus-like, carry sacks full of soil up interminable wooden ladders, to then descend back down the muddy, near vertical, slopes into the bowels of the Earth to repeat their back-breaking tasks.

At least 100,000 worked at Serra Pelada between 1980 and 1986. Miners were paid 20 cents for digging and carrying a 40-pound sack of soil to the surface, with a bonus for gold discovered.

The mine’s recorded total yield was 44.5 tonnes but it is believed 90 per cent was smuggled out into shadow markets  — that’s around £1.5 billion at today’s prices.

Salgado employed close-ups, wide panoramas, flat tableaux and near-impossible perspective angles to peer into the mine and register both the apocalyptic swarms of bodies as well as, by contrast, individuals in fleeting moments of respite, horror, exhaustion or discord.

Peter Howe, former photo editor at The New York Times, remembers the deafening silence at the first sight of these images: “I never saw editors react to any set of pictures as they did to Serra Pelada,” he recalls.

Never has that hoary adage “an image is worth 1,000 words” been more pertinent. Salgado’s are an epiphany of Biblical proportions in their depiction of brutalising exploitation and human desperation.

They’re an indictment of capitalism and the underpinning obscenity of human exploitation at its core.

Gold by Sebastiao Salgado is published by Taschen, £50.