SAHEL:
The End of the Road
Sebastiao Salgãdo
Hardbound,
11.25 " x 11.25", 160 pages
black-and-white illustrations
2004, University of Chicago Press
In 1984 Sebastião Salgado began what
would be a fifteen-month project of photographing the drought-stricken
Sahel region of Africa in the countries of Chad, Ethiopia, Mali,
and Sudan, where approximately one million people died from extreme
malnutrition and related causes. Working with the humanitarian
organization Doctors Without Borders, Salgado documented the enormous
suffering and the great dignity of the refugees.
This earliest complete work became a template
for his future photographic projects about other afflicted people
around the world. Since then, Salgado has again and again sought
to give visual voice to those millions of human beings who, because
of military conflict, poverty, famine, overpopulation, pestilence,
environmental degradation, and other forms of catastrophe, teeter
on the edge of survival. Beautifully produced, with thoughtful
supporting narratives by Orville Schell, Fred Ritchin, and Eduardo
Galeano, this first U.S. edition brings some of Salgado's earliest
and most important work to an American audience for the first
time. Twenty years after the photographs
were taken, 'Sahel: The End of the Road ' is still painfully
relevant.
Born in Brazil in 1944, Sebastiao Salgado studied
economics in Sao Paulo and Paris and worked in Brazil and England.
While traveling as an economist to Africa, he began photographing
the people he encountered. Working entirely in a black-and-white
format, Salgado highlights the larger meaning of what is happening
to his subjects with an imagery that testifies to the fundamental
dignity of all humanity while simultaneously protesting its violation
by war, poverty, and other injustices. 'The planet remains divided,'
Salgado explains.'The first world in a crisis of excess, the third
world in a crisis of need.' This disparity between the haves and
the have-nots is the subtext of almost all of Salgado's work -
Publisher
Book
order form
|
