Famine in Sahel-Sebastiao Selgado
Sebastiao Selgado is one of the most famous photojournalists in history. Salgado's fame as an international photographer began with his harsh yet moving photographs of the "Famine in the Sahel" during the mid 1980's. He worked with the humanitarian organization, Doctors without Borders, on an year and a half project documenting the devastating famine in Africa. During this time, Selgado borrowed his wife's camera and captured a variety of subjects exposed to the harshest conditions of existence. Even though Selgado's photographs vividly express human suffering through sophisticated and dramatic compositions, they seem to never lose sight of their subject's humanity. These images capture moments of complete despair, but each one also shines light on human beings fighting for their dignity. Selgado's talent arises from his ability to take these images of suffering, while showing a respect that does not violate, but rather penetrates the human spirit. His photographic images are beautiful objects of tone and light, even though they express such morbid conditions of human pain in its raw form. Selgado is concerned with making his pictures viewed not as art objects, but rather documentation in a purely journalist fo
By doing so, we feel a connection to the woman and we see her pain without hearing her story. Salgado's powerful images have become icons of the human condition: death, suffering, dignity, eternal hope and survival. Many of Salgado's images are iconographic, a vast range of subjects, yet each one shows Salgado's vision of the individual in their specific situation. That dignity is the source of their indescribable beauty. Selgado's project on Famine in Sahel intrigued me the most because of the extremely moving subject matter, and the way in which he captured human existence. Each of Selgado's photographs has an intellectual, emotional, and visual way of communicating the reality of human existence. One of Selgado's most famous portraits from the Sahel project is a photograph called Dead Eyes. Selgado has created penetrating images that show a sensitive awareness of graphic art as well as an intuitive understanding of his human subjects. One of Selgado's photographs, which contains an extremely starved man standing proud in front of a dying tree, caught my attention the most. It seems as if Salgado seeks to create a link of empathy and evoke an acute sensitivity for the guilt. He has won many awards for his work and has been featured in many magazines and museums. Another one of Selgado's photographs that especially captivated my attention was an up close image of an elderly woman clutching her head with her palms. Selgado is a world renowned photographer and humanitarian.
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