Workers: An Archaeology of the Industrial Age - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0714837180 ISBN 13: 9780714837185

Publisher: Phaidon Inc Ltd, 1999

Synopsis

This book is a global epic that transcends mere image-making to become an affirmation of the enduring spirit of working women and men sebastiao salgado unearths layers of visual information to reveal the ceaseless human activity at the core of modern civilization with extended captions by the photographer providing a historical and factual framework for the images, the book is divided into six essential agriculture, food, mining, industry, oil and construction though an elegy for the passing of traditional methods of labour and production, workers ultimately delivers a dynamic message of endurance and hope through an aestheticism that is instantly arresting, irrespective of time and place

About this title

About the Author

Sebastiao Salgado (b.1944) is one of the leading photojournalists working today. Born in Brazil and trained as an economist, his political activities led to his exile in the late 1960s. He has received many awards, including the W Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography, and his many books have been published to great acclaim. He is currently based in Paris.

From Library Journal

Salgado, an economist by training, documents the unforgettable faces of workers at their jobs around the world. His widely published images of the oil-field firefighters in Kuwait may be the most familiar to U.S. readers. The catalog for a traveling exhibition, this book is divided into six chapters--Agriculture, Food, Mining, Industry, Oil, and Construction--that show the basest realities of work in some of its uncountable forms, from fishing in Spain, to textile factories in Kazakhstan, Eurotunnel construction in France, a slaughterhouse in South Dakota, and gold miners in Brazil. The reader almost never sees a smiling face or evidence of job satisfaction. Instead, this is an iconography of wage-labor toil, alienation, and survival. The location and subject of each related group of images are announced in the table of contents; otherwise, one needs to consult a separate softbound booklet in a pocket in the back, which offers Salgado's facts and statistics about the particular natural resource, geographical area, and type of work pictured. The reproductions here are of superb quality. The winner of numerous international photography awards, Salgado ( An Uncertain Grace , LJ 2/1/91) has renewed the "concerned photographer" genre and produced one of the finest books of this decade. Essential for all art and photography collections.
- Kathleen Collins, New York Transit Museum Archives, Brooklyn
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Phaidon Inc Ltd
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0714837180
• ISBN 13: 9780714837185
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400