Story Behind
STORYBEHIND
Superlatives are hard to avoid when describing the work of Sebastião Salgado . Recently , one magazine hailed him as the ‘ world ’ s greatest living photographer ’ and while such statements are often thoughtlessly attributed to many lesser mortals , it is diffcult to argue against such a claim for the Paris-based artist . Now 73 , Salgado is renowned for the epic scale of his photographic projects , involving years of planning , travelling and editing , all with a painstaking devotion to create books as heavy as coffee tables and exhibitions that fll the world ’ s grandest museums .
Salgado ’ S frst great book , Workers , is a prime example of his ambition : over a six-year period , the Brazilian-born photographer travelled across 23 countries , taking more than 10,000 negatives of what playwright Arthur Miller later described as “ the pain , beauty and brutality of the world of work on which everything rests .” For Salgado , who also wrote the text accompanying the 350 black and white photographs , Workers was , “ a farewell to a world of manual labour that is slowly disappearing and a tribute to those men and women who still work as they have for centuries .” Now , another quarter of a century later , he recalls Workers as a logical response to his formative years among the student radicals of 1960s Paris , before joining the International Coffee Organisation in London as a macro economist . He tells us : “ I made my studies as an economist , I made studies of the macro economy and I made studies of Marxism where proletarians were important . So , you know what I wished to do ? I started with the proletarians and went to photograph the workers of this planet over many years .” Salgado ’ s camera accentuated the harsh and grim reality of the working lives of shipbreakers , cane cutters , steel makers , miners and fishermen , while also bestowing a nobility and stoicism in the portrayal of his subjects that left no doubt about his own political sympathies . He explains : “ You see , everything that I did was linked to my preoccupations with my way of life , from the studies that I made from my political orientation . I love very much to work on long term projects where it is possible for me to put myself inside , have a dedication , a concentration and identifcation with the things that I ’ m looking at photographing .” It was in his native Brazil in the mid-1980s , within the vast interior of an enormous open-cut gold mine called Serra Pelada , that Salgado made his seminal images of thousands of gold miners , stripped to the waist and dripping in mud and sweat . He wrote : “ Anyone arriving there for the frst time confronts an extraordinary and tormented view of the human animal : 50,000 men sculpted by mud and dreams . All that can be heard are murmurs and silent shouts , the scrape of shovels driven by human hands , not a hint of a machine .” The resulting pictures were published worldwide , securing his reputation and ensuring a heightened level of expectancy about the Workers project . When the book was fnally published in 1993 , more than 20 photos from Serra Pelada were included . Workers covered more than impoverished manual labour in the developing world : Salgado also ventured underground to document the excavations of the Channel Tunnel and to the oil-drenched deserts of Kuwait in the aftermath of the frst Gulf War in 1991 .
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