Visual Communications Research Blog 1

Sebastiao Salgado

Sebastiao Salgado is a photographer who was born on February the 8th, 1944 in Brazil. He became a photographer in the 1970's, he is well known for his photographs including poverty, famine, industrialization and political oppression, his main experty and the thing he is most famous for is photojournalism in which he has won many different awards, he was influenced by other photojournalists such as Lewis Hine, W. Eugene Smith and Walker Evans. Aside from being a photographer Sebastiao Salgado is also a UNICEF ambassador.

A book Sebastiao Salgado is well known for is a book called Workers: archaeology of the Industrial age, in this book Sebastiao Salgado focuses on work from the Stone Age up to the industrial age to the present day; it is mixed up into 6 parts Agriculture, Food, Mining, Industry, Oil and Construction. The books main focus is the carelessness and the poor working conditions all types of civilization worked/work in. He also hasn't just focused on one part of the world he has focused on many different places such as Sahel and South America. All of his photos are in black and white I think he has done this because it exaggerates the poor working conditions and the dullness of the jobs that were being shown. Even though the photos are in black and white i feel the shade and contrast are very important for example in the first photo on the left there eyes and lips have a light shade on them I feel Sebastiao Salgado has done this because the eyes and mouth are usually associated with life (the breath and the twinkle in the eye) and the light shade stands out against the grey which could represent the danger and dullness of the job.

  

 

 
 

Another book he has produced and is very well known is a book called Migrations, this book was published in the year 2000 and is simply what it says in the title, the book includes 7 years of photographs which focus on migrants moving from one place to another, it includes 35 and people migrating from many different places he hasn’t just focused on one group of migrants. Like workers all the photos are taken in black and white i think this is because like the books workers it exaggerates the dullness if the conditions they were in were positive then I feel there would be a use of colour. I feel he has also just used black and white because it shows the simplicity and tell the viewer that the things you can see the migrants with is all they have. in both these books he has taken his photographs in a lot of different angles and styles, although in works there are a lot more close up shots compared to the book migrants I think this is because he wants there to be a bond between the viewer and the worker but with the migrants there are a lot of wide angle shots and longs shots which produce a very noise photo, I think this is because he wants to show how small the migrants are and how nobody is noticing them enough to help.