BOOKS
Workers – An Archaeology of the Industrial Age

The social price of progress

In modern industrial society, characterised by technological progress and material abundance, people are exposed to a constant flood of information, which often leads to personal isolation and emotional emptiness. In the age of Instagram & Co., photography has also become a fleeting means of communication and has moved far away from its original task of capturing reality in its unadulterated form. In countless images, the aesthetic illusion of a perfect world is constructed again and again just to temporarily suppress the feeling of social alienation.

A chronicler of the forgotten

The work of Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado goes far beyond simply depicting the daily life of the working class he admires. The former economist looks deep into the engine room of modern societies and relentlessly shows the hard, often sweaty working conditions at the lower end of society. By portraying their arduous lives, he restores the dignity robbed from nameless people all over the world by the modern world of work and emphasises their indispensable contribution to the seemingly self-evident prosperity of the industrial age.

Salgado’s hidden message

The book “Workers” by Sebastião Salgado, published by Taschen Verlag, honours Salgado’s decades of work in numerous black and white photographs over 400 pages. The photographs are like sirens that initially captivate the unsuspecting viewer with their immediate beauty, only to confront them with their actual, brutal message completely unprepared. They tell of the hardship and misery of hard physical labour, of exploitation and modern slavery, which have been completely forgotten in many parts of the industrialised world today, and in a dialogue without words, they call on us to recognise the uncomfortable truth behind our own prosperity.

The legacy of Salgado

Sebastião Salgado’s contribution to photography and his commitment to social and environmental issues have earned him numerous honours, including the Oskar Barnack Award from the World Press Photo Foundation. His unique work has not only enriched photography as a documentary medium, but has also given a voice to those who would otherwise have remained invisible. Salgado’s timeless art is to combine photography with empathy and thus naturally inspire the viewer to reflect on human existence and global grievances.

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Further information

Further information on the book “Workers” (Advertising) by Sebastião Salgado can be found on the Taschen Verlag website.

Compliance

The book was kindly made available to us by the publisher. The presentation and rating of HYPERMADE remains independent of this and is based solely on the content of the book.