Sebastião Ribeiro Salgado (Aimorés, State of Minas Gerais, February 8th 1944) is a Photographe Brésil IEN.

Salgado belongs to these photographers for whom photography has not only one value artistic but also a political scope and social.

Biography

The initial training of Sebastião Salgado is that of an economist: after studies at the University of São Paulo (1967) then with the Vanderbilt University in the United States (1968) it carries out a science thesis Economiques with the Université of Paris (1971).

He works for International Coffee Organization in London until in 1973, date on which he changes career brutally and starts to be interested in photography, as an autodidact. He integrates successively the photographic agencies Sygma (1974-1975), Gamma (1975-1979) and Magnum (1979-1994).

Salgado chooses itself its projects with the four corners of the world: he always works in black and white and observes the life of those which live and which work on the dark side of the company: migrants, minors, victims of the famine… One of its most famous reports, entitled the Gold mine of Tightened Pelada , relates to the daily newspaper in a gold mine to the Brésil, report in which he manages to describe very humanly, without never falling into the trap from demagogic criticism, the absolutely primitive work conditions to which the minors are subjected.

He is named special representative of UNICEF in 2001.

In the introduction of Exoduses , he writes: “More than ever, I feel that the human race is one. Beyond the differences in color, of language, of culture and possibilities, the feelings and the reactions of each one are identical. People flee the wars to escape death; they emigrate to improve their fate; they forge new existences in foreign countries: they adapt at worst the situations… ”.

However, since the beginning of the Years 2000, of the journalists (of which the NewYork Times ) and the writer Susan Sontag criticize the photographs of Salgado. The photographer is shown to use in a cynical and commercial way human misery, to make beautiful the dramatic situations which it seizes with the risk to make them lose their authenticity. Sontag wonders about “the unauthenticity of beautiful” in the work of Salgado.

After behaving been a long time in the Agency Magnum photographie" , Salgado decides into 1994 to found its own photographic agency " Amazonas images" in company of its wife Lélia Wanick Salgado.

Brief bibliography

• Exodus , Editions of Martinière, Paris, 2000
• Terra , Editions of Martinière, France, 1997
• the gold mine of Tightened Pelada , Galerie Debret, Paris, 1994
• the Hand of the Man , Editions of Martinière, France, 1993
• Other Americas , Editions Contrejour, France, 1986
• the Sahel: the Man Unweaves of it , Prisma Presse and National center of Photography, for Doctors without borders, France, 1986
• Hmongs , Doctors without borders, Chêne/Hachette, Paris, 1982

See too

Articles on Wikipédia

• social Photography

External bonds

1. Site terra.com .br