Sebastiao Salgado

With a new exhibition featuring unpublished prints from the burning oil fields of Kuwait, Sebastião Salgado tells Keith Wilson why he is devoting more time to reviewing his life and earlier work

- Keith Wilson

Acclaimed as one of the world’s greatest photographers living today, Sebastião Salgado is known for the epic scale of his photo projects, which involve years of planning and editing; a painstaking devotion to the creation of books as heavy as coffee tables; and exhibitions that fill the world’s grandest museums.

Salgado’s first great book, Workers, published in 1993, is a prime example of his ambition: over a six-year period, the Brazilian-born photographer travelled across 23 countries, taking more than 10 thousand negatives of what playwright Arthur Miller described as “the pain, beauty and brutality of the world of work on which everything rests”. For Salgado, who also wrote the text accompanying the 350 black-and-white photographs, Workers was “a farewell to a world of manual labour that is slowly disappearing, and a tribute to those men and women who still work as they have for centuries”.

Before discovering photography, Salgado grew up on a cattle ranch in Brazil, then moved to Paris in the 1960s to study economics at university. After graduating, he joined the International Coffee Organisation in London as a macroeconomist. Student politics, economics and the role of manual labour provided the inspiration for Workers. He recalls: “I made my studies as an economist, I made studies of the macro economy, and I made studies of Marxism where proletarians were important. So, you know what I wished to do? I started with the proletarians and went to photograph the workers of this planet over many years.”