Sebastiao Salgado

            Sebastiao Salgado and the Migrations Project.
             Sebastiao Salgado was born the son of a cattle rancher in Minas Gerais, Brazil. During many years, he witnessed the social and economic rural transformation of the area, hundreds of farms with thousand families living on them being replaced by a few enormous farms in logic of monoculture agricultural production. Some of the ex-owners were employed as part-time workers under limited contracts, whereas others flew to the large city centers searching for better opportunities. Salgado also observed the impact of the arrival of new technology on the lines of production, which pushed workers out of the fields, taking them to major urban centers in the search for jobs. In 1993, migration in Brazil amounted for 120 million field workers going to the cities, ten times the population of New York City. .
             Salgado claims to understand migration quite well, for in the 1960s he had to abandon Brazil for political reasons, and move to Paris. He says that "it is not surprising that I should identify, even feel a certain complicity, with exiles, migrants, people shaping new lives for themselves far from their birthplaces." Salgado's close relationship with photography developed after borrowing his wife's camera on a trip to Africa, and joining the Sygma Photo Agency, for which he covered news and events such as wars in Angola and the Spanish Sahara, and started to develop more personal and in-depth documentary projects. Salgado's "concerned photography" debuted with "Other Americas," a collection of photographs of peasant cultures and the cultural resistance of Indians and their descendants in Mexico and Brazil. His next work was "Sahel: Man in Distress," a document of the drought-stricken Sahel region of Africa, where he worked for over a year with the French aid group Doctors Without Borders. Salgado's third documentary was "Workers," which illustrated the end of large-scale manual labor.