More light on the subject.

• Author: Harris, Patricia Roberts
• Position: Photographer Sebastiao Salgado

Sebastiao Salgado demonstrates a serene faith in the power of still, black-and-white photography in an age where color photographs and video reportage reign supreme. He can sum up worlds of experience and decades of time in a single image. Consider his 1986 photograph, entitled "A moment of rest," taken at the Brazilian gold mine of Serra Pelada. A vast spectacle is encapsulated in a single image of a man catching his breath while thousands toil around him. It is a moment that would disappear in video or film, vanish in the swirl of human activity.

"If you looked at the 50,000 gold miners on TV, it would seem almost normal because you're used to masses of people in that small frame," says Fred Ritchin, the former New York Times photo editor who recently curated Salgado's mid-career retrospective exhibition, An Uncertain Grace. "Their situation passes and a new situation appears in the next subject. But when you look at the still [photograph], you can really look and almost count the people and begin to feel what it might be like to be in it. It's a different kind of openness to the reader. The reader has much more ability to linger, more ability to roam."

Salgado works in the tradition of documentary photography, creating magazine and newspaper photographs--and books--to tell stories from all parts of the globe. But he does not generally concentration on the breaking news, the immediate occurrences of today for publication tomorrow morning. He is a photographer of conditions, not necessarily of events.

Born February 8, 1944, in Aimores, Minais Gerais, Brazil, Salgado was raised on a cattle ranch. He earned a master's degree in economics from Sao Paulo University in Brazil and Vanderbilt University in Brazil and Vanderbilt University in the United States. After completing course work for his doctorate at the University of Paris, he worked for the International Coffee Organization in London from 1971 to 1973. A business trip to Ethiopia with his wife's camera in tow changed the direction of his life. The images that haunted him from that visit were not of the mountain coffee plantations, but the effects of amine on the people living in the Sahel at the desert's edge. Soon after, he was working for the World Health Organization, documenting famine in the Sahel. Economist no more, Salgado was launched on his career as a photojournalist.

The Sahel was to be a touchstone for Salgado. He reutned in 1984-85 to create a body of photographs that...