Human Motion, Still Pictures.

• Author: Runyan, Curtis
• Position: Review

Sebastiao Salgado, Migrations: Humanity in Transition (New York: Aperture, 2000, www.aperture.org)

The stories reflected in the pictures of photo journalist Sebastiao Salgado are not simple; they cannot be told in 1,000 words. Driftwood and human bodies collect in pools beneath the waterfall they have been washed over. Children play behind cage doors and barbed wire. Hundreds of tired figures huddle under torn plastic tarps, anticipating a coming storm.

These photos tell stories that are usually whispered, if they are told at all. And yet the tales of the dispossessed and the disenfranchised have been carefully gathered and developed in Salgado's latest collection of photographs, Migrations: Humanity in Transition. "For six years in forty countries, I worked among these fugitives, on the road, or in the refugee camps and city slums where they often end up," he writes in the introduction. "Many were going through the worst periods of their lives. They were frightened, uncomfortable, and humiliated. Yet they allowed themselves to be photographed, I believe, because they wanted their plight to be made known."

Around the world last year, at least one out of every 100 persons was "displaced." Well over 57 million people were pushed out of their homes, set adrift as refugees, exiles, or as "internally displaced persons" (a title given to refugees who did not cross an international border). Add migrants to the displaced, and the number of people who are on the move is probably in the hundreds of millions. China alone has a "floating" population of job seekers estimated at more than 100 million people.

But numbers, masses of numbers, can't begin to convey the experience of individual faces, single bodies, sets of hands. Migrations casts light on these abstract figures, tallies, and estimates, exposing the human flesh that lies beneath. "I know this story well," said Salgado in an interview with Nancy Madlin of Photo District News, "because it is my own story. I made the same migrations that a great mass of the world's population is doing now." Born on a farm in Brazil, he had a childhood punctuated by moves to larger and larger towns. He studied in the booming metropolis Sao Paolo, but after the military government began to crack down on dissidents, in 1969 he was forced into exile for his political sympathies. In France he completed coursework for a doctorate in economics, and then traveled to Africa to study the Sahel Drought in 1973. When he...