Sahel: The End of the Road

by Sebastião Salgado, Orville Schell (Foreword by), Fred Ritchin (Introduction), Eduardo Galeano (Afterword), Lélia Wanick Salgado (Designed by)

Overview

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 early 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, Sebastião Salgado studied economics in São 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520241701
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	10/11/2004
Series:	Series in Contemporary Photography , #3
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	152
Product dimensions:	11.00(w) x 11.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Sebastião Salgado has been awarded more than fifty international prizes from countries including France, Germany, Holland, Spain, Sweden, Japan, and the United States. He has twice been named Photojournalist of the Year by the International Center of Photography in New York. He is a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador and an honorary member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences in the United States. Major exhibitions of his work include Sahel: L'Homme en détresse (1986), Other Americas (1986), An Uncertain Grace (1990), Workers: An Archaeology of the Industrial Age (1993), Migrations: Humanity in Transition (2000), and The Children: Refugees and Migrants (2000).

Orville Schell is Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.

Fred Ritchin is Director of PixelPress (www.pixelpress.org), Associate Professor of Photography and Imaging at New York University, and former Picture Editor for the New York Times Magazine.

Eduardo Galeano's books have been translated into more than twenty languages. He is the winner of the Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom.

Lélia Wanick Salgado conceived, created, and edited almost all of Sebastião Salgado's books, as well as most of his exhibitions. She is the Director of Amazonas Images.

Read an Excerpt

"While art should speak for itself, Salgado's photography is first and foremost a documentary way of bearing witness to something else. His work is both an anguished cri de coeur and, although he professes not to be religious, something of a votive offering presented in the hopes of getting the attention of a world that sometimes seems to have fallen asleep."--Orville Schell, from the Foreword

Table of Contents

Foreword
Sahel: Man in Distress / Orville Schell

Introduction
Twenty Years Ago, and Later / Fred Ritchin

Photographs

Captions

Afterword
Salgado / Eduardo Galeano

Biographical Note
Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

"Sahel remains an extraordinary document of compassion for those victims of a devastated landscape who would otherwise have been forgotten."

Times Higher Education

"These gut-wrenching portraits remind us that truly seeing the world means looking beyond our next adventure."

Outside Magazine

"Perhaps Salgado’s photographs, finally finding their way into U.S. consciousness through this book, will move us to take action beyond looking."

American Journalism

"The aesthetic and ethnical response to such photographs can and will be debated for as long as these image exist. But what can’t be denied is the importance of photographers willing to bear witness, with visual strength, so all of us can see."

Nieman Reports

"Haunting and powerful. . . . Salgado’s visual power is clearer and more imperative than ever."

Dallas Morning News

"These gut-wrenching portraits remind us that truly seeing the world means looking beyond our next adventure."

Outside Magazine

Shot over 15 months during 1984-1985 as a horrific famine raged across sub-Saharan Africa, Salgado's documentation of the Sahel region (including parts of Chad, Ethiopia, Mali and the Sudan) was one of his first projects as he transitioned from working economist to photographer. More than 50 prizes and many books and exhibitions later, this edition brings that early work into the States in book form for the first time. Each of the 80 or so b&w shots is given a full page with generous borders; that photos of people near death are beautifully composed and printed make for just two of their paradoxes. Orville Schell argues in his foreword that "[Salgado's] strategy is to pull us into the subject with visual seduction, and then once we are enthralled-or shocked, as the case may be-to educate us about the issue at hand." With the genocide and displacement of black Africans by their Arab northern compatriots in the Sudan currently leading to serious food shortages, Salgado's book remains at the very least a relevant call to action. Portions of the profits of the book will be donated to Doctors Without Borders. (Oct.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly