Salbastio Salgado

Salbastio Salgado is a Brazilian social documentary photographer and photojournalist, who has travelled to 100 different countries to take his photographs.
He started to take photographs in the 1970s and onwards. He was trained as an economist and changed careers to become a photographer. He presents his work in the form of an artists, in published books.

His subject is people, essentially he photographs the result of globalisation. He photographs the reality of out lives, poverty being one of the main themes, and how it effects people.
He used 35mm cameras mainly to shoot with, all of them being black and white. He printed all of his own images himself. All of his photographs are very moody, atmospheric and powerful.
His images are educational, showing how people actually live in different environments.
He doesn't want people to give up on the homeless, he wants somebody to find a solution for poverty.
All of his photographs are beautiful pictures revealing reality, they do not look down on anybody. Just one picture which can take a second to take can show a whole story on what is actually happening in the world. His pictures are very emotional and expressive.
His photos speak 100 words, as they are describing a lot, within the pictures rather than being written down or said.

Salbastio Salgado says it is a privilege to take these photographs, and he has gained trust through living with the people he photographed.
Some people would ask him if he could photograph them, so this gave him a huge responsibility to photograph these people with respect and showing the right message.
His audience are very rich people, with nice houses, have good jobs, a family and a happy life, which he is aware of, these are very different people to the people who are in his photographs, and they live very different lives.
He did a series of head and shoulder shorts, or sitting portraits of children who are homeless, partly because they wanted to be photographed and let him get on with it.
The children look directly into the lens, on the photographs and their eyes speak in the images, showing emotion.

These are just some of the photographs Salbastio Salgado captured, portraying how these different people live and and how it's completely different from our lives.