Sebastião Salgado’s classic photo book Workers. An Archaeology of the Industrial Age (first published in 1993) pays tribute to the time-honored tradition of manual labor in the new millennium, as machines and computers replace human workers around the world.
With images of striking beauty and integrity, Salgado creates a visual elegy for working men and women whose indomitable spirit endures the harshest conditions.
More than those of any other living photographer, Sebastião Salgado's images of the world's poor celebrate the human condition.
Salgado describes his work as 'militant photography' dedicated to 'the best understanding of humanity'; over the decades he has brought great dignity to the most isolated and neglected people among us – from famine-stricken refugees in the Sahel to the indigenous peoples of South America.
This book is a tribute to those men and women who still work as they have for centuries.
~ Sebastião Salgado
In this book, three hundred and fifty duotone photographs provide an archaeological perspective on the forms of labor that have defined human effort from the Stone Age through the Industrial Revolution to the present.
Through the hellish landscape of an Indonesian sulfur mine, the drama of traditional Sicilian tuna fishing and the staggering endurance of Brazilian gold miners, Salgado reveals layers of visual information about the ceaseless human activity at the heart of modern civilization.
Sebastião Salgado: "Photography is memory. The instant in which you capture the subject in front of you with a click. In that moment you carve out a memory of that instance. It's the representation of a moment just gone by, but that will be preserved with that image. Photographs are the archives of history."
Lélia Wanick Salgado: "Books are documents that stand the test of time, that live on. A book can be picked back up, and read over, and over again."
Workers presents its subject on several interconnected levels. Salgado’s introductory text, written with Brazilian author Eric Nepomuceno, expands on his passionate photographic iconography .
Extensive captions, also written by Salgado, provide a historical and factual framework. Together they form a tribute to working people.
Sebastião Salgado began his career as a professional photographer in Paris in 1973 and later worked with the agencies Sygma, Gamma and Magnum Photos. In 1994, he and his wife, Lélia Wanick Salgado, established Amazonas Images, their studio and the exclusive representative of his work.
Salgado's photographic projects have been featured in many exhibitions and books, including Sahel. L'Homme en détresse (1986), Other Americas (1986), Terra (1997), Migrations (2000), The Children (2000), Africa (2007), Genesis (2013), The Scent of a Dream (2015), Kuwait. A Desert on Fire (2016), Gold (2019) and Amazônia (2021).
Sebastião Salgado. Workers. An Archaeology of the Industrial Age - Sebastião Salgado, Lélia Wanick Salgado (Editor)
Pages: 400
Price: €81.85
Publisher: Taschen. Language: English. This article refers to the English-language edition.
