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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