Workers

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Even as machines, robots and computers replace workers, Salgado's powerful, striking photographs reveal the backbreaking and unrelenting toil that is still the lot of millions of men and women around the globe. Never preachy or didactic, these 350 duotone images of tea pickers in Rwanda, dam builders in India, steelworkers in France and Ukraine, sugarcane harvesters in Brazil, assembly-line workers in Russia and China, sulfur miners in Indonesia and others, pay tribute to working people who preserve their dignity in the harshest conditions. In the lyrical accompanying essay, Salgado ( An Uncertain Grace ) laments Japan's industrial fishing which decimates fish stocks, France's agricultural policies and the global exploitation of manual laborers who do the bulk of the world's work. (Sept.)

Library Journal

Salgado, an economist by training, documents the unforgettable faces of workers at their jobs around the world. His widely published images of the oil-field firefighters in Kuwait may be the most familiar to U.S. readers. The catalog for a traveling exhibition, this book is divided into six chapters--Agriculture, Food, Mining, Industry, Oil, and Construction--that show the basest realities of work in some of its uncountable forms, from fishing in Spain, to textile factories in Kazakhstan, Eurotunnel construction in France, a slaughterhouse in South Dakota, and gold miners in Brazil. The reader almost never sees a smiling face or evidence of job satisfaction. Instead, this is an iconography of wage-labor toil, alienation, and survival. The location and subject of each related group of images are announced in the table of contents; otherwise, one needs to consult a separate softbound booklet in a pocket in the back, which offers Salgado's facts and statistics about the particular natural resource, geographical area, and type of work pictured. The reproductions here are of superb quality. The winner of numerous international photography awards, Salgado An Uncertain Grace , LJ 2/1/91 has renewed the ``concerned photographer'' genre and produced one of the finest books of this decade. Essential for all art and photography collections.-- Kathleen Collins, New York Transit Museum Archives, Brooklyn

Internet Bookwatch

Photographer Salgado's unique photographic works are internationally acclaimed pieces: this presents his ongoing focus on the industrial age and the human condition. He defines his work as 'militant photography' dedicated to an understanding of man in society: this provides over three hundred duotone photos from an archaeological perspective of the human activities which have defined the Industrial Revolution past to present. His introductory text provides fine explanation of his photographic focus and intentions.