Sebastião Salgado: Workers: An Archaeology of the Industrial Age - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 089381525X ISBN 13: 9780893815257

Publisher: Aperture, 2005

Synopsis

More than those of any other living photographer, Sebastião Salgado's images of the world's poor stand in tribute to the human condition. His transforming photographs bestow dignity on the most isolated and neglected, from famine-stricken refugees in the Sahel to the indigenous peoples of South America. "Workers" is a global epic that transcends mere imagery to become an affirmation of the enduring spirit of working women and men. The book is an archaeological exploration of the activities that have defined labor from the Stone Age through the Industrial Age, to the present. Divided into six categories--"Agriculture," "Food," "Mining," "Industry," "Oil" and "Construction"--the book unearths layers of visual information to reveal the ceaseless human activity at the core of modern civilization. Extended captions provide a historical and factual framework for the images. "Salgado unveils the pain, the beauty, and the brutality of the world of work on which everything rests," wrote Arthur Miller of this photobook classic, upon its original publication in 1993. "This is a collection of deep devotion and impressive skill." An elegy for the passing of traditional methods of labor and production, "Workers" delivers a message of endurance and hope.

About this title

About the Author:

Sebastião Salgado (born in Aimorés, Brazil, 1944) began working as a professional photographer in 1973. Since then, he has published numerous books, held solo shows, received international awards, and along with his wife, Lélia Wanick Salgado, founded Amazonas images, an agency created for his work.

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Aperture
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 089381525X
• ISBN 13: 9780893815257
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 400