Kicking myself for just missing his latest show at Somerset House. It was even called "Amazon". Does it get much better?
This recent discovery comes via my personal photography guru, The Bone Warmer. Though he's hardly news to the world of photojournalism, Salgado has been an exciting acquisition in my slightly behind-the-times sphere of photographic knowledge.
Sitting here, heavy headed and slow to end another day in foggy London town, Salgado's work feels ripe for long, lazy contemplation. Sharp focus meets bleary eyed escapism. And it's here, for me, that the true dreaminess of black-and-white photography lies. Such images play with the constructedness of their content, holding fantasy and reality together in calm simultaneity. Salgado acts as documentarian of a world, a scene, a face which we know must be real yet seems eerily just beyond truth.
Look, there it is. Right there in the photograph. It's real, isn't it? And yet it also seems too big, too beautiful, too sad and too strange to be real. So maybe it is, maybe it isn't. At least I'm thinking.
all images © Sabastiao Salgado
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