Sebastião Salgado | History of Photography | Humanist Documentary | Photo Coordinates |
Sebastião Salgado is a key figure for understanding the history of photography around Documentary and Social Photography. This page follows the photographer's place in photography history through labor, migration, and global documentary photography, and the representative work Workers, related photographers, movements, and sources.
Sebastiao Salgado moved from economics to photography because he felt that numbers and reports could not convey human suffering with the force that images might*1. His projects on labor, migration, famine, and ecology gave documentary photography an epic, often monumental scale, from the miners of Serra Pelada to the displaced people of Migrations and the environments of Genesis*2. At the same time, his lush black-and-white style placed him at the center of intense ethical debate about whether beauty deepens or weakens political response to suffering*4. Salgado remains one of the most influential and contested figures in late documentary photography*1.