Sebastiano Salgado was born in Brazil in 1944. After a short career as an economist in age of 29 he started working as a photojournalist and few years later moved to documentary photography. Salgado’s book was published in 1993 and presents final effect of seven years of traveling around the planet mainly to the “forgotten” places where world’s poorest fight for their existence. Our look is attracted by beauty and honesty of these photographs. They take us on a fascinating and true journey through perseverance, grace, dignity, devotion and endurance of working people. There is noticeable line dividing his work from typical photojournalism practice which main aim is to inform. We can see here Salgado’s sensibility and ability to identify himself with characters in photographs. Many times, during his travels, he “shared a bed” with them. Salgado clearly indicate one of the most important problems of first world civilization – its ignorance and brutality in striving to achieve its own goals; and building future on fundaments of poverty of third world. Although it is difficult not polemicize with Salgado. In dedication author says: “This book is an homage to workers, a farewell to a world of manual labour that is slowly disappearing and a tribute to those men and women who still work as they have for centuries”. He wrote these words just after second world fell into ruins. From perspective of nearly twenty years we can see that new millennium didn’t bring a change and poverty and manual labour spread even more widely across the world. Are we witnessing the situation where Fritz’s Lang vision became a true? Salgado also says: “The destiny of man and women is to create a new world, to reveal a new life, to remember that there exists a frontier for everything except dreams”. I think that in our world as it is in the eternal course of nature not all dreams and voices will be audible in creating a new future. Documentary film about Salgado (part one): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5X76jieUgTQ&feature=related
Monday, 28 March 2011
Sebastiano Salgado "Workers: an archaeology of the industrial age". (books)
Sebastiano Salgado was born in Brazil in 1944. After a short career as an economist in age of 29 he started working as a photojournalist and few years later moved to documentary photography. Salgado’s book was published in 1993 and presents final effect of seven years of traveling around the planet mainly to the “forgotten” places where world’s poorest fight for their existence. Our look is attracted by beauty and honesty of these photographs. They take us on a fascinating and true journey through perseverance, grace, dignity, devotion and endurance of working people. There is noticeable line dividing his work from typical photojournalism practice which main aim is to inform. We can see here Salgado’s sensibility and ability to identify himself with characters in photographs. Many times, during his travels, he “shared a bed” with them. Salgado clearly indicate one of the most important problems of first world civilization – its ignorance and brutality in striving to achieve its own goals; and building future on fundaments of poverty of third world. Although it is difficult not polemicize with Salgado. In dedication author says: “This book is an homage to workers, a farewell to a world of manual labour that is slowly disappearing and a tribute to those men and women who still work as they have for centuries”. He wrote these words just after second world fell into ruins. From perspective of nearly twenty years we can see that new millennium didn’t bring a change and poverty and manual labour spread even more widely across the world. Are we witnessing the situation where Fritz’s Lang vision became a true? Salgado also says: “The destiny of man and women is to create a new world, to reveal a new life, to remember that there exists a frontier for everything except dreams”. I think that in our world as it is in the eternal course of nature not all dreams and voices will be audible in creating a new future. Documentary film about Salgado (part one): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5X76jieUgTQ&feature=related
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment