Sebastiao Salgado

Sebastiao Salgado was born the son of a cattle rancher in Minas Gerais, Brazil. During many years, he witnessed the social and economic rural transformation of the area, hundreds of farms with thousand families living on them being replaced by a few enormous farms in logic of monoculture agricultural production. Some of the ex-owners were employed as part-time workers under limited contracts, whereas others flew to the large city centers searching for better opportunities. Salgado also observed the impact of the arrival of new technology on the lines of production, which pushed workers out of the fields, taking them to major urban centers in the search for jobs. In 1993, migration in Brazil amounted for 120 million field workers going to the cities, ten times the population of New York City.

Salgado claims to understand migration quite well, for in the 1960s he had to abandon Brazil for political reasons, and move to Paris. He says that “it is not surprising that I should identify, even feel a certain complicity, with exiles, migrants, people shaping new lives for themselves far from their birthplaces.” Salgado’s close relationship with photography developed after borr

owing his wife’s camera on a trip to Africa, and joining the Sygma Photo Agency, for which he covered news and events such as wars in Angola and the Spanish Sahara, and started to develop more personal and in-depth documentary projects. Salgado’s “concerned photography” debuted with “Other Americas,” a collection of photographs of peasant cultures and the cultural resistance of Indians and their descendants in Mexico and Brazil. His next work was “Sahel: Man in Distress,” a document of the drought-stricken Sahel region of Africa, where he worked for over a year with the French aid group Doctors Without Borders. Salgado’s third documentary was “Workers,” which illustrated the end of large-scale manual labor. “Terra: Struggle of the Landless” was his fourth project, and it showed the men and women in Brazil fighting to reclaim their native land. “Terra” was followed by the Migrations Project, which culminated with his book “Migrations and The Children,” an illustration of the “plight of displaced persons, refugees and immigrants in over forty countries” (kjjljl, 90). Although Salgado’s work is linked together like different chapters of the same story, the Migrations Project stands out as the most extraordinary of all, for it conveys the idea of “the physical and personal journey of those who migrate, and contribute to the reorganization of humankind” (kkhkhlk,98). The three most impressive photographs of “Migrations” are “The Swollen Cities, The Tiete Bus Terminal, and Girl of Serra Pelada.” Those photographs must be analyzed in their meaning, purpose and quality in order to better understand the nature of Salgado’s work, as well as his artistic style.

Salgado’s seemingly simple and straightforward portraits depict with force the pain and dignity of immigrants, the men and women on whom humankind depends in order to build the future. He photographs women, men and children in the mega-cities of the world, showing the individual placed in the crowd. Salgado’s “Swollen Cities” photograph shows babies and skyscrapers in a peaceful, but unique kind of co-existence. His “Tiete Bus Terminal” embodies

Some topics in this essay:
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