Sebastião Salgado

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Salgado, Sebastião (b. 1944), Brazilian photographer. Trained as an economist, Salgado worked initially for the International Coffee Organization before taking up the camera in 1973. He became a photojournalist, a member successively of three leading agencies— Sygma, Gamma, and finally Magnum, the latter from 1979 to 1994. He set up his own photo agency, Amazonas Images, in 1994. Although he had a distinguished career as a news photographer (including the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan in 1981), he always preferred to work on large-scale thematic projects concerned with socio-economic change.

Salgado's photography might be termed pictorialist humanism: his photographs are expressively dramatic in their composition and tonality. Almost all in black-and-white, they have been used to create substantial pictorial monographs on macro-themes, intensively studied by Salgado. These have included a lengthy project on the threats to the indigenous peasant culture of South America (published as Other Americas, 1986), work on famine in North Africa (Sahel: l'homme en détresse, 1986); and a global project on the end of heavy industrial labour, published as Workers in 1993, that covered 26 countries. This was followed by a study of the plight of landless agricultural workers in Brazil, published as Terra: Struggle of the Landless (1997), and a further global study of population movements and their effects, Migrations and The Children (both 2000). Most recently he has photographed the polio eradication programme for UNICEF.

Throughout Salgado's work, characterized by its intensive exploration of the major socio-political issues of the world, there are two interesting threads. First is the sense of a universal humanism, which runs quite at odds with the anti- humanist trends present in much postmodern photography and its embrace by the art world. Salgado's photography is about basic human rights that apply everywhere: he is not a relativist, though he is interested in pictorial exploration of the widely different aspects of human life. Secondly, Salgado makes pictures that are often quite formal in their presentation of their subjects, who appear to represent human types or social categories rather than individuals in their own right. In this sense they recall certain images present in classical painting: the resting worker in the famous Serra Pelada mining series (1986) recalls a figure from an Italian Renaissance painting of a biblical scene.

Perhaps these two things account for the enormous appeal of Salgado's work, which is often widely distributed as multiple exhibitions that can be readily shown in different types of public space rather than art galleries alone, and as beautifully produced books that detail the major stages of his extraordinary output as a photographer.

— Peter Hamilton