Sebastião Salgado

Sebastião Salgado (born February 8, 1944) is a Brazilian social documentary photographer and photojournalist. Salgado works on long term, self-assigned projects many of which have been published as books: The Other Americas, Sahel, Workers, Migrations and Genesis. The later three are mammoth collections with hundreds of images each from all around the world. His most famous pictures are of a gold mine in Brazil called Serra Pelada. Here are some of his images:

Here we can see one of the many images Salgado took at the Serra Pelada gold mine. This image is very powerful as you can see there are hundreds of men, climbing very steep ladders with heavy sacks on their backs.The amount of people cramped on the ladders just shows us the sheer amount of hard work these men are doing and they don't look in the best of conditions. They are wearing old rags for clothes and not very sturdy shoes, and this makes us feel more sympathy for the hard workers who are also covered in mud.

In this image we can see two men working with and oil rig. Again, the men are covered in oil and mud and don't look very happy about it. Salgado didn't ask them to pose for the photo he just took it as they were working as this gives us a clearer understanding of the work these men are doing.





Here we can see people outside their tents and again they are in shabby clothing and look like they've had a hard day or work. None of the people in this image are posing, Salgado just took it as he was walking through.







There's is a recurring theme in most of Salgado's images, they include a lot of  manual labour to show the hard work people go through each day.