Sebastião Salgado

Black-and-white photography from all stages of Salgado's storied career, including images from his internationally acclaimed Workers and Migrations series

Brazilian documentary photographer Sebastião Salgado is one of the greatest figures of modern photography, placing human issues and the world's upheavals at the heart of his projects. This monograph presents two distinct stages of his oeuvre, through a selection of over 400 prints held in the collection of the Maison Européenne de la Photographie. First, a journey through the first 25 years of Salgado's career as a photographer and photojournalist, in which he continually confronted the fury and torment of humanity through famed series such as Workers (1993), documenting the vanishing way of life of manual laborers across the world, and Migrations (2000), a tribute to mass migration driven by hunger, natural disasters, environmental degradation and demographic pressure. This chapter is followed by selections from Salgado's Genesis project (2013), an epic eight-year expedition to photograph the mountains, deserts and oceans, and the animals and peoples that have so far escaped the imprint of modern society. These recent works are a homage to the beauty and fragility of our planet, still untouched by the madness of mankind, and which it is vital to preserve.
Sebastião Salgado (born 1944) originally trained as an economist. He began his photographic career in 1973, working initially as a photojournalist before turning toward the long-term, socially oriented documentary projects for which he is well known, such as Workers, Migrations and, most recently, Genesis. A UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador since 2001, Salgado has also been involved in rainforest conservation and restoration through his organization Insituto Terra.