#95 CAMERA Book Review: Sebastião Salgado - Workers

A slow look through the wonderful work of Sebastião Salgado's Workers: Archaeology of the Industrial Age.

Sebastião Salgado's Workers: An Archaeology of the Industrial Age was published by Aperture in 1993 following six years of work undertaken between 1986 and 1992. During this period Salgado travelled to more than twenty countries to document forms of manual labour that were rapidly disappearing through mechanisation and industrial change. Organised into six thematic sections covering agriculture, food production, mining, industry, oil and construction, the book examines occupations ranging from the gold miners of Serra Pelada in Brazil and the sulphur miners of Indonesia to tea pickers in Rwanda, steelworkers in France and Ukraine, ship breakers in Bangladesh and dam builders in India. Rather than presenting isolated photographic essays, Salgado assembled the work as a global study of physical labour at the end of the industrial age.

The photographs were made using medium format black and white film and are accompanied by extensive captions and historical commentary that place each workplace within its economic and social context. Salgado was concerned not only with the physical demands of manual work but also with the wider transformation of production as traditional industries gave way to automation and globalisation. By bringing together workers from different continents within a single publication, Workers examines the shared conditions of labour across cultures while documenting occupations that, in many cases, have since been fundamentally altered or disappeared altogether. The book remains one of the most comprehensive photographic studies of manual labour ever produced and a landmark in the history of documentary photography.

400 pages
Publisher: Phaidon Press Ltd; 1st Edition edition (8 July 1993)
Language: English
Product Dimensions: 1.7 x 15.2 x 21.5 cm

Sebastião Salgado

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