Sebastiao Salgado: Concerned Photography

Sebastiao Salgado's work embodies, perhaps more than that of any other contemporary artist, a social conscience. Salgado is one of the truly great living photographers -- not just because he takes aesthetically pleasing pictures but because he has chosen to document humanity as a mobile, stratified, working, conflicting, suffering, regenerative entity with a talent for both self-destruction and survival. The names of his projects indicate the nature of his work: Man in Distress, Other Americas, An Uncertain Grace, Workers, Migrations. "What I want in my pictures is not that they'll look like art objects," he says. "They are journalist pictures. All my pictures. No exceptions."

They are, however, art objects. Sombre, insightful, desolate, rooted poetry in black and white. Such as this picture of a Rwandan refugee camp in Tanzania.


Or this one from Bosnia.


In the introduction to Migrations, he wrote, "More than ever, I feel that the human race is one. There are differences of colour, language, culture and opportunities, but people's feelings and reactions are alike. People flee wars to escape death, they migrate to improve their fortunes, they build new lives in foreign lands, they adapt to extreme hardship..." Salgado's camera has documented deprivation, displacement and labour like no other. He does not revel in the incisive flashes of wit of a Cartier-Bresson -- instead, he stresses thematic unity and the humanitarian angle. He can shock and disturb (see, for example, his photographs of famine in the Sahel), but he is never didactic or sentimental.

Here are some more of his pictures, from Brazil, China, Sudan, Ecuador, India and elsewhere.


Online exhibitions of Sebastiao Salgado's photographs may be found at:

• PDN/Kodak Legends Online
• Salgado's homepage
• Amazonas Images, his agency