Sebastiao Salgado

An exhibition of photographs by Sebastiao Salgado featuring work he undertook in central Africa during the famine in the mid-1980s. The exhibition includes photographs of refugee camps and families on the move across desert landscapes as well as portraits of people that show the extent of human endurance and suffering

Pallant House Gallery is proud to present an exhibition of photographs by the internationally renowned photographer Sebastião Salgado (b.1944). All eighteen photographs on display in the Prints Room have been loaned to the award-winning Gallery of Modern Art in the South by the Arden and Anstruther photographic gallery in Petworth, West Sussex. The late Paul Arden (1940-2008) first saw Salgado’s work in an exhibition at the Photographers Gallery in London and was so overwhelmed by the power of the images he saw, that he bought the entire collection. In his role as executive creative director for the advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi, Arden commissioned Salgado to take photographs for many of the agency’s campaigns. This exhibition features iconic images from Salgado’s photographic projects in South America and Africa in the 1980s. Born in Brazil, Salgado initially studied and worked in economics before discovering a talent for photography in 1973 when he borrowed his wife’s camera on a trip to Africa. He spent the years between 1977 and 1984 travelling his native Latin America and producing images for his book and exhibition ‘Other Americas’ (1986) which explored peasant cultures in remote regions. Salgado then worked for fifteen months with the French aid agency Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) in the Sahel region of Africa where drought and famine were having a devastating effect. The photographs he took are a testament to the dignity and endurance of people facing extreme suffering. In 1986 he began a new project ‘Workers’, a documentary examining large-scale manual labour across 26 countries and including the astonishing images of workers in the gold-mines of Serra Pelada in Brazil.