Sunday, February 19, 2006

Sebastião Salgado

Sebastião Salgado is an incredible photographer, who has been creating powerful breath-taking images for years.
His photographic essays cover subjects like famine, migration and workers. I used a photo from his worker series. Salgado writes, "These photographs tell the story of an era. The images offer a visual archaeology of a time that history knows as the Industrial Revolution, a time when men and women at work with their hands provided the central axis of the world.Concepts of production and efficiency are changing, and, with them, the nature of work. The highly industrialized world is racing ahead and stumbling over the future. So the planet remains divided, the first world in a crisis of excess, the third world in a crisis of need, and, at the end of the century, the second world--that built on socialism--in ruins."

On a subject close to my heart, and one that I don't quite understand from the perspective of rejection by wealthier societies, he writes of refugees and immgrants:
Wars have increasingly targeted civilians as terror has become a weapon of first resort. Millions of people have had to uproot themselves setting off on foot, in trucks, aboard overcrowded boats or trains to seek refuge. Those who survive often end up in sprawling refugee camps where existence continues to be precarious. Similarly, when poverty becomes intolerable many seek to move on, either for large cities or, if they are more adventurous, towards far-off prosperous nations. Sometimes it is the men alone who leave. Other times it is whole families risking their lives for the unfamiliarity of new surroundings. In the process they bring deep transformations to the social fabric where they settle as well as to themselves.

No comments: