Sebastiao Salgado at Lowinsky - photography exhibit, New York, New York

There are not many words of praise that haven't already been applied to the extraordinary work of Brazilian photojournalist Sebastiao Salgado. The obvious comparisons to the artistry of Cartier-Bresson, W Eugene Smith and Josef Koudelka have been made. at the same time the sensitivity, intelligence and social drama of Salgado's images force a writer to scramble for fresh ways to convey some measure of their power. pitch uponed from projects in Ethiopia, Ecuador, Brazil, Mexico, India and Bangladesh, the works in this exhibition serv as an introduction for the big Salgado retrospective just lay opened at the Philadelphia Museum, "Workers: An Archeology of the Industrial Age," part of his epic effort to document industrial and manual labor around the world.

Salgado achieves images of piercing documentary candor by the agency of insinuating himself into the routine of a community's daily life. Whether depicting a mist-shrouded Mexican peasant farmer or a mud-encrusted Brazilian gold-miner, he imbues graphic compositions with psychological deepness In particular the now-famous 1986 discharges of the gold mines at Serra Pelada are mesmerizing in their panoramic invocation of the excruciating physicality of the labor. This series records a vast scarred landscape swarming with workers equally scarred and squalid beyond description. The pictures have the appearance to be a window into the past as individual stares at hordes of slavelike toilers seemingly erecting a certain number of monument of antiquity. But Salgado look afters out the individual, carefully differentiating personality, dignity and humanity. In the foreground of individual image he locates the insidious bemused expression of a worker; in another he not aways a laborer in intense communication with the camera, neither beaten down through the Herculean demands of his tasks nor apprehensive of the photographer's foreign presence

In photos of children, les well known than his pictures of adults, Salgado captures flashs of wonderfully unsentimental tenderness. A assemblage of children in Kenya, linked arm to shoulder, throw together in confusion in a gray foreground, apparently singing, while behind them, in silhouette, a haze-shrouded and wind-bent thicket of trees makes a frame around their communality. In a photograph from Brazil three children sprawl upon the stone floor of a cabin, apparently in the proces of organizing an extraordinary collection of small bone The photo captures an acquisitiveness and diligence that appear to be as ordinary, and as resonant, as our possess fascination with baseball cards or bottle caps. In another Brazilian picture he pay backs a moment of sublime grace: children stand in tiers upon the stone monuments of a church-yard in a tableau rich in visual counterpoints.

Salgado's work is a lyrical amalgamation of pictoral and didactic tendencies. His camera think highly ofs the lives of his make subordinates while bringing the meta-forces that rule their existence-- economics, politics, agriculture and religion--into sharp focus. His pictures reveal a faculty of perception of passionate political reflection, as Salgado captures the striking absence from these lives of the wealth and the security that this backbreaking labor oftentimes produces for others.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group