Sebastião Salgado

The Art of Photography: A Deep Dive with Sebastio Salgado

Sebastio Salgado's photography is a testament to his unique perspective and skill as an artist. What is striking about his work is the way he weaves together themes of humanity, nature, and social justice. As you navigate through his photographs, it becomes clear that Salgado's shots are not just aesthetically pleasing but also carry a deep meaning.

One of the things that stands out in Salgado's photography is his use of negative space and shadows to create beautiful effects. He often uses these elements to create a sense of depth and atmosphere in his images. For example, in some of the photographs featuring pyramids off in the distance, he uses the fog as a means of suggesting what might be beyond the horizon. This technique creates a sense of mystery and intrigue, drawing the viewer's eye into the image.

Salgado's use of composition is also noteworthy. In one photograph, he takes us to a train track where we wait for something interesting to happen. The resulting shot is a masterclass in composition, with the tracks stretching out as far as the eye can see. This attention to detail and ability to find beauty in unexpected places is a hallmark of Salgado's work.

Another aspect of Salgado's photography that stands out is his use of light. In one photograph, he captures the moment when rainwater pours down on a train window, creating a mesmerizing scene that draws the viewer in. This attention to lighting not only creates an image but also tells a story.

Salgado's work has been influenced by his own life experiences and his desire to make a difference through his photography. He is driven by a sense of purpose, which is evident in every frame he takes. As Salgado himself says, "I don't like the word Advanced but a very deep photographer" – this is a testament to his commitment to using his craft as a means of visual communication.

One aspect of Salgado's life that might surprise some viewers is that he had a pre-photographic career in economics and even earned a master's degree. However, it was only when he turned to photography that he discovered his true calling. This shift from one path to another has given him the opportunity to explore themes that are both deeply personal and universally relevant.

Salgado's work also carries a message about the importance of finding your passion and pursuing it with dedication. He is not a child prodigy, but rather someone who has figured out what he is good at and what calls to him. This is a powerful lesson for anyone looking to follow their own creative path.

To gain a deeper understanding of Salgado's work and his philosophy as a photographer, I recommend checking out his Ted Talk on The Genesis Project. In this talk, Salgado shares the story of how he came back to Brazil after feeling burnt out on his photography career and found a new sense of purpose in conservation efforts. He also talks about shifting from photographing people to photographing animals – and how that shift renewed his passion for the craft.

As we close, I want to reiterate just how much Salgado's work has to offer. From his stunning images of pyramids to his thought-provoking photographs of train tracks, every frame is a testament to his skill and dedication as an artist. Whether you're a seasoned photographer or simply someone who appreciates great art, Sebastio Salgado's work is sure to inspire and challenge you.

Note: The article can be developed further with more examples from Salgado's photography, more context on his life and career, and possibly some interviews or quotes from the photographer himself.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enI would even go out in a limb and say he's one of the Fest finest photo journalists have come along since the great hre K Bron and I'm speaking of course of the Brazilian born sebastio Sado and if this is your first introduction to sado's work uh prepare yourself uh he is one of the more intense individuals to ever come along uh sagato kind of has these two sides to him um on the one hand you have somebody who's got this beautiful wonderful sense of composition that I haven't seen anybody else look like um he's really the opposite of being a minimalist he deals with uh a lot of subjects in his photographs but delivers them in a very cohesive beautiful artistic way and on the other hand you have sagato who's a very intense individual uh to begin with um very uh involved with political activism his entire career it's kind of had change in recent years but still very active uh in using the camera and using art and photography is a way to make the planet better and realizing the power of of the visual image and what that entails and the responsibility behind that I'll talk some more to sagato at the end but I think it's best now to go look at some work so without further Ado this is the work of sebastio Sado sebastio sarado was born in Brazil on February 8th 1944 he grew up on a farm with his Seven Sisters Sado originally pursued a career in economics graduating with his master's degree from the University of sa Pao after beginning his Doctorate he moved to London and worked as an economist for the international coffee organization around the age of 26 he began to develop an interest in photography it didn't take long to develop his skill and within several years he decided to pursue a second career as a photojournalist in 1979 he joined Magnum photos of which he was a member until starting his own agency in 1994 salgado's earliest influences included Lewis Hine W Eugene Smith and Walker Evans much like his Heroes he developed a style in black and white that found beauty and brutal subjects of poverty hardship and oppression of various cultures under the wake of industrial ization to the native landscape sado's work for years raised Global awareness to varying human conditions yielding two well-known books the first in 1986 was a 9-year study of rural cultures in Latin America titled other Americans in 1993 his seminal book workers revealed the often harsh conditions of large-scale industrial sites including oil fields and Commercial Fisheries other well-known photographs include a series in Africa as part of the Doctors Without board ERS project and his most famous photographs were his depictions of gold miners in Sarah Pala in 2004 his work shifted once again this time to landscape and Wildlife as he began his work on Genesis published in 2013 Genesis is a collection of images from some of the most remote parts of the world as Salgado aimed to capture landscape that is completely Untouched by humans Salgado is also known for his charitable work with organizations such as Doctors Without Borders he is a Goodwill Ambassador for Unicef and an honorary member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences he and his wife founded the agency amazonus images and co-founded the Environmental Education Center Institute Yota that works on the restoration of Brazilian rainforce we're going to look at some work by sebastio Salgado and the book I'm using for this is en titled workers uh very well-known book that he did it's very dense in terms of the amount of photographs in here and the quality of the images too This is Aperture foundation and it's pretty easy to find I'll link it up in the show notes I can't remember whether you can get it new still but it's certainly easy to find uh used uh there were a lot of copies of this printed and the images I want to start with today are these and this is a series this was actually taken in Brazil the these are gold miners and Brazil was going through at the time a gold rush that was not unlike what happened in the United States years ago and then Australia as well but these are like hundreds of thousands of people that are mining gold and I think these are amazing and the reason I want to start here is because I think it shows that you know in contrast to a lot of the photographers that I feature on this show uh we kind of run the gamut but you know my tastes run towards more minimalistic stuff and sagato I love and it's odd because he's a complete 180 from minimalism there is a minimalist quality but it deals with a ton of detail and I don't know if it's picking up in the video well or not but these are all people down here and you know when you look at the type of phono journalism that he did is so unique uh some of these compositions the framing choices uh and it's so different than what you see you know from the European school that hre Cartier Bron started and even very different from photographers like Robert Frank uh it's it's its own thing and I think Sado represents just this amazing voice in the world of photojournalism and he did in fact work for Magnum for years uh here's two more plates from this and just just pouring out of people but what's interesting compositionally is he's gotten far enough back to where you have this this you know eye for detail in here and at the same time you know seeing the streams of people it's almost like herds and you see the herds in the Genesis series that he did too so he's he's a big fan of that you know type of scale uh of a lot of extreme detail when you pull back it has a more minimal quality to it that that's quite amazing uh another Mark that you're going to see a lot in sado's work and early on uh in the early days he shot uh using a like a 35mm camera I think by the time he had gone to Africa and started work on that series he wanted a bigger negative um and so he moved to 645 format and then actually today he's shooting digital um it's kind of neither here nor there but one of the trademarks that I am pointing out with his film usage is it's a Hallmark of his style especially in in this this era of work is a lot of this grain texture that you get uh you know big uh obviously class Trix look uh high contrast with lots of big grain in it and I think it just makes such a beautiful image uh you know was what he was going for and again the series of groupings with these fishermen on these boats um a lot of the fishermen images uh you know if you if you've ever been you know back in the days where it was real common to have photographers do annual reports when you go to work sites a lot of times they're not easy to shoot and for a variety of reasons and a lot of that is because they're not set up visually they're set up for people who are doing a lot of work and to get images of this quality out of those types of sites is very difficult um but you know sagato just does it in such a beautiful way it it's amazing the kinds of action that he'll capture sometime like these fish splashing around in the Nets um you know some of this work does get pretty gruesome here cuz they they do start you know turning them into food here but uh it's just amazing the amount of detail the dark quality to these and as I mentioned in his bio uh you know Salgado was was very big into raising awareness of working conditions of you know and he used photography as his tool to communicate that and his his voice and I think that's what Drew him to doing photojournalism was being able to tell that kind of a story sometimes better and sometimes For Worse um one of my favorite shots of his is this thing of a shipyard where you have these two large boats and just these these uh you know the the tubes that go amongst them here these hoses it's just stunning uh the quality the detail and like I said if you've ever been to a site like this they're not as easy to photograph as you would think um it's not like he just went opened up the camera and went for it but you know again looking for these patterns of detail that become a shape in a larger form um you know with these planks that come around form the bow of this bow as they're putting it together uh it's just simply stunning uh stunning work one of my favorite shots of his is this one with the ship with this you know the just the way the water forms around here and then you have this High grain and this you know the contrast with the white from the the water and the ship that sits right down the middle and you know a lot of these shots are a lot of sit around and wait for hours and hours and hours until the moment comes where you have all the elements that come together to get this beautiful shot and uh you know stuff like this it's kind of simple too you have this huge boat out here but what makes the shot is the little figure in the foreground here U just extremely beautiful quality to these and like I said Salgado um it's like nothing else uh there aren't any other photographers that I think he looks like um you don't see a lot of people I'm sure there are people that are largely influenced by salato but it's not an easy style to copy and therefore it stands out as being really unique and uh you know this is a great book there's lots of foldouts in here um and there's a ton of images what's also nice is all the images are indexed um by Series so if you're curious as to what something is or if you're looking for something it's really easy to find in the front of the book um this is a great shot too I love this worker uh with the welding goggles on with the head tilted back and the sense of emotion that comes out of this again probably not a lot of beautiful stuff to shoot on this location so it's about waiting for a certain person and a certain point in time and it's about immersing yourself in that worker type culture and uh you know it's it is not easy to do um just little stuff like you know this this figure jumping over here to uh you know facilitate whatever's going on uh you know but this expression of the body that comes into play the welding with all the smoke going on um you know it's it's really tough to get these shots and obviously contrast comes into play on these it's a big part of the shots it's what is not being photographed in some of these with the negative space and the shadows and it really creates a beautiful uh beautiful effect I love this too with these pyramids off on the off on the right hand side and in the fog and you know suggestion of what might be um another welding shot anyway just absolutely stunning work I would I would check this out um workers is amazing here's another one that's interesting too and again we're at basically a train track here what's interesting to shoot well waiting for this guy to do something interesting uh you know it's really difficult to find those moments and if you know you consider like the hre car Bron mindset of waiting for the decisive moment sometimes it's you know there gentleman's out here working but there's something compositionally interesting happening with the tracks here so you know with sagato you're you're you're seeing a very well rounded a very um and I don't like the word Advanced but a very uh deep photographer in the sense of the range of stuff he's able to capture in the range of mood here's another one that's shot through a raining windshield on a train you know just looking for these moments that that it is just particularly amazing and sagato was so good at this uh anyway once again that book is workers I will link this up in the show notes and that is the work of sebastio Salgado Salgado is a very complex individual and a very complex photographer I believe and as you can see in his work um it it's simply amazing what he's able to do with a camera um I'm not aware of anybody else that shoots in a style like this and I you know there's a certain sense of individuality about it but I also love the fact that salgado's uh inspiration is to use the camera as means of visual communication to make the world a better place another thing I really like about sebastio sagato is you're looking at somebody who I mean I'm sure he's been an intense character his entire life um but you know he had this whole career uh that was set out for him he even got a master's degree and went to go work in economics and after engaging in this career is when he decided that he had this passion for photography and he decided he was fairly good at it and he polished his skills and and then went on to have this enormously successful uh Cinderella career as a photographer being able to work for Magnum and and shoot the locations he shot um I can guarantee a lot of this work was not glamorous to do but I think that also intensifies and gives you an appreciation for the talent level if somebody likes Salgado um and you know I also like that that has a message that it sends that that says you don't have to be a child prodigy at something um we all are kind of put on this planet and we figure out what we're good at and what it is that we're kind of called to do and he certainly certainly did all that um I encourage you to go research more about Sado um you know in these short videos that we do it's hard to really get our heads around all the complexities of soato um one place I would like to start and I put a link in the show notes for this but there is a wonderful Ted talk that Salgado gave a few years ago where he was talking about how The Genesis Project came to be and he was talking about um how he had literally burn himself out uh you know with all the travel schedule a lot of the conditions that he was shooting in he felt in his words that he was dying and he he thought he was actually physically sick went to the doctor and and had lost an interest in photography at this point in his career and kind of you know to reset the clock he and his wife moved back to Brazil and started becoming active with rainforest preservation noticing that they had gone back to the family land and that it was pretty much decimated uh from where it was when salato was a child and mainly because of industrialization and what we tend to do to this planet and they really started this foundation and went full force into this uh he also talks about shifting from shooting one animal species which is people to shooting animal species that are not people and it's really interesting because it's still the same photographer it's still the same uh you know amazing high level of talent and what he brings to the table as a phot photographer uh with Genesis and you know but the message is different and how it renewed his interest anyway it's a great Ted talk I will put a link in the show notes before and I suggest you check it out anyway guys thank you for watching once again this has been another episode of The Art of Photography I'll see you guys in the next video laterI would even go out in a limb and say he's one of the Fest finest photo journalists have come along since the great hre K Bron and I'm speaking of course of the Brazilian born sebastio Sado and if this is your first introduction to sado's work uh prepare yourself uh he is one of the more intense individuals to ever come along uh sagato kind of has these two sides to him um on the one hand you have somebody who's got this beautiful wonderful sense of composition that I haven't seen anybody else look like um he's really the opposite of being a minimalist he deals with uh a lot of subjects in his photographs but delivers them in a very cohesive beautiful artistic way and on the other hand you have sagato who's a very intense individual uh to begin with um very uh involved with political activism his entire career it's kind of had change in recent years but still very active uh in using the camera and using art and photography is a way to make the planet better and realizing the power of of the visual image and what that entails and the responsibility behind that I'll talk some more to sagato at the end but I think it's best now to go look at some work so without further Ado this is the work of sebastio Sado sebastio sarado was born in Brazil on February 8th 1944 he grew up on a farm with his Seven Sisters Sado originally pursued a career in economics graduating with his master's degree from the University of sa Pao after beginning his Doctorate he moved to London and worked as an economist for the international coffee organization around the age of 26 he began to develop an interest in photography it didn't take long to develop his skill and within several years he decided to pursue a second career as a photojournalist in 1979 he joined Magnum photos of which he was a member until starting his own agency in 1994 salgado's earliest influences included Lewis Hine W Eugene Smith and Walker Evans much like his Heroes he developed a style in black and white that found beauty and brutal subjects of poverty hardship and oppression of various cultures under the wake of industrial ization to the native landscape sado's work for years raised Global awareness to varying human conditions yielding two well-known books the first in 1986 was a 9-year study of rural cultures in Latin America titled other Americans in 1993 his seminal book workers revealed the often harsh conditions of large-scale industrial sites including oil fields and Commercial Fisheries other well-known photographs include a series in Africa as part of the Doctors Without board ERS project and his most famous photographs were his depictions of gold miners in Sarah Pala in 2004 his work shifted once again this time to landscape and Wildlife as he began his work on Genesis published in 2013 Genesis is a collection of images from some of the most remote parts of the world as Salgado aimed to capture landscape that is completely Untouched by humans Salgado is also known for his charitable work with organizations such as Doctors Without Borders he is a Goodwill Ambassador for Unicef and an honorary member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences he and his wife founded the agency amazonus images and co-founded the Environmental Education Center Institute Yota that works on the restoration of Brazilian rainforce we're going to look at some work by sebastio Salgado and the book I'm using for this is en titled workers uh very well-known book that he did it's very dense in terms of the amount of photographs in here and the quality of the images too This is Aperture foundation and it's pretty easy to find I'll link it up in the show notes I can't remember whether you can get it new still but it's certainly easy to find uh used uh there were a lot of copies of this printed and the images I want to start with today are these and this is a series this was actually taken in Brazil the these are gold miners and Brazil was going through at the time a gold rush that was not unlike what happened in the United States years ago and then Australia as well but these are like hundreds of thousands of people that are mining gold and I think these are amazing and the reason I want to start here is because I think it shows that you know in contrast to a lot of the photographers that I feature on this show uh we kind of run the gamut but you know my tastes run towards more minimalistic stuff and sagato I love and it's odd because he's a complete 180 from minimalism there is a minimalist quality but it deals with a ton of detail and I don't know if it's picking up in the video well or not but these are all people down here and you know when you look at the type of phono journalism that he did is so unique uh some of these compositions the framing choices uh and it's so different than what you see you know from the European school that hre Cartier Bron started and even very different from photographers like Robert Frank uh it's it's its own thing and I think Sado represents just this amazing voice in the world of photojournalism and he did in fact work for Magnum for years uh here's two more plates from this and just just pouring out of people but what's interesting compositionally is he's gotten far enough back to where you have this this you know eye for detail in here and at the same time you know seeing the streams of people it's almost like herds and you see the herds in the Genesis series that he did too so he's he's a big fan of that you know type of scale uh of a lot of extreme detail when you pull back it has a more minimal quality to it that that's quite amazing uh another Mark that you're going to see a lot in sado's work and early on uh in the early days he shot uh using a like a 35mm camera I think by the time he had gone to Africa and started work on that series he wanted a bigger negative um and so he moved to 645 format and then actually today he's shooting digital um it's kind of neither here nor there but one of the trademarks that I am pointing out with his film usage is it's a Hallmark of his style especially in in this this era of work is a lot of this grain texture that you get uh you know big uh obviously class Trix look uh high contrast with lots of big grain in it and I think it just makes such a beautiful image uh you know was what he was going for and again the series of groupings with these fishermen on these boats um a lot of the fishermen images uh you know if you if you've ever been you know back in the days where it was real common to have photographers do annual reports when you go to work sites a lot of times they're not easy to shoot and for a variety of reasons and a lot of that is because they're not set up visually they're set up for people who are doing a lot of work and to get images of this quality out of those types of sites is very difficult um but you know sagato just does it in such a beautiful way it it's amazing the kinds of action that he'll capture sometime like these fish splashing around in the Nets um you know some of this work does get pretty gruesome here cuz they they do start you know turning them into food here but uh it's just amazing the amount of detail the dark quality to these and as I mentioned in his bio uh you know Salgado was was very big into raising awareness of working conditions of you know and he used photography as his tool to communicate that and his his voice and I think that's what Drew him to doing photojournalism was being able to tell that kind of a story sometimes better and sometimes For Worse um one of my favorite shots of his is this thing of a shipyard where you have these two large boats and just these these uh you know the the tubes that go amongst them here these hoses it's just stunning uh the quality the detail and like I said if you've ever been to a site like this they're not as easy to photograph as you would think um it's not like he just went opened up the camera and went for it but you know again looking for these patterns of detail that become a shape in a larger form um you know with these planks that come around form the bow of this bow as they're putting it together uh it's just simply stunning uh stunning work one of my favorite shots of his is this one with the ship with this you know the just the way the water forms around here and then you have this High grain and this you know the contrast with the white from the the water and the ship that sits right down the middle and you know a lot of these shots are a lot of sit around and wait for hours and hours and hours until the moment comes where you have all the elements that come together to get this beautiful shot and uh you know stuff like this it's kind of simple too you have this huge boat out here but what makes the shot is the little figure in the foreground here U just extremely beautiful quality to these and like I said Salgado um it's like nothing else uh there aren't any other photographers that I think he looks like um you don't see a lot of people I'm sure there are people that are largely influenced by salato but it's not an easy style to copy and therefore it stands out as being really unique and uh you know this is a great book there's lots of foldouts in here um and there's a ton of images what's also nice is all the images are indexed um by Series so if you're curious as to what something is or if you're looking for something it's really easy to find in the front of the book um this is a great shot too I love this worker uh with the welding goggles on with the head tilted back and the sense of emotion that comes out of this again probably not a lot of beautiful stuff to shoot on this location so it's about waiting for a certain person and a certain point in time and it's about immersing yourself in that worker type culture and uh you know it's it is not easy to do um just little stuff like you know this this figure jumping over here to uh you know facilitate whatever's going on uh you know but this expression of the body that comes into play the welding with all the smoke going on um you know it's it's really tough to get these shots and obviously contrast comes into play on these it's a big part of the shots it's what is not being photographed in some of these with the negative space and the shadows and it really creates a beautiful uh beautiful effect I love this too with these pyramids off on the off on the right hand side and in the fog and you know suggestion of what might be um another welding shot anyway just absolutely stunning work I would I would check this out um workers is amazing here's another one that's interesting too and again we're at basically a train track here what's interesting to shoot well waiting for this guy to do something interesting uh you know it's really difficult to find those moments and if you know you consider like the hre car Bron mindset of waiting for the decisive moment sometimes it's you know there gentleman's out here working but there's something compositionally interesting happening with the tracks here so you know with sagato you're you're you're seeing a very well rounded a very um and I don't like the word Advanced but a very uh deep photographer in the sense of the range of stuff he's able to capture in the range of mood here's another one that's shot through a raining windshield on a train you know just looking for these moments that that it is just particularly amazing and sagato was so good at this uh anyway once again that book is workers I will link this up in the show notes and that is the work of sebastio Salgado Salgado is a very complex individual and a very complex photographer I believe and as you can see in his work um it it's simply amazing what he's able to do with a camera um I'm not aware of anybody else that shoots in a style like this and I you know there's a certain sense of individuality about it but I also love the fact that salgado's uh inspiration is to use the camera as means of visual communication to make the world a better place another thing I really like about sebastio sagato is you're looking at somebody who I mean I'm sure he's been an intense character his entire life um but you know he had this whole career uh that was set out for him he even got a master's degree and went to go work in economics and after engaging in this career is when he decided that he had this passion for photography and he decided he was fairly good at it and he polished his skills and and then went on to have this enormously successful uh Cinderella career as a photographer being able to work for Magnum and and shoot the locations he shot um I can guarantee a lot of this work was not glamorous to do but I think that also intensifies and gives you an appreciation for the talent level if somebody likes Salgado um and you know I also like that that has a message that it sends that that says you don't have to be a child prodigy at something um we all are kind of put on this planet and we figure out what we're good at and what it is that we're kind of called to do and he certainly certainly did all that um I encourage you to go research more about Sado um you know in these short videos that we do it's hard to really get our heads around all the complexities of soato um one place I would like to start and I put a link in the show notes for this but there is a wonderful Ted talk that Salgado gave a few years ago where he was talking about how The Genesis Project came to be and he was talking about um how he had literally burn himself out uh you know with all the travel schedule a lot of the conditions that he was shooting in he felt in his words that he was dying and he he thought he was actually physically sick went to the doctor and and had lost an interest in photography at this point in his career and kind of you know to reset the clock he and his wife moved back to Brazil and started becoming active with rainforest preservation noticing that they had gone back to the family land and that it was pretty much decimated uh from where it was when salato was a child and mainly because of industrialization and what we tend to do to this planet and they really started this foundation and went full force into this uh he also talks about shifting from shooting one animal species which is people to shooting animal species that are not people and it's really interesting because it's still the same photographer it's still the same uh you know amazing high level of talent and what he brings to the table as a phot photographer uh with Genesis and you know but the message is different and how it renewed his interest anyway it's a great Ted talk I will put a link in the show notes before and I suggest you check it out anyway guys thank you for watching once again this has been another episode of The Art of Photography I'll see you guys in the next video later\n"