Sahel: The End of the Road » (1st Edition)

Sebastião Salgado has been awarded more than fifty international prizes from countries including France, Germany, Holland, Spain, Sweden, Japan, and the United States. He has twice been named Photojournalist of the Year by the
International Center of Photography in New York. He is a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador and an honorary member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences in the United States. Major exhibitions of his work include Sahel: L'Homme en détresse (1986), Other Americas (1986), An Uncertain Grace (1990), Workers: An Archaeology of the
Industrial Age (1993), Migrations: Humanity in Transition (2000), and The Children: Refugees and Migrants (2000). Orville Schell is Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. Fred Ritchin is Director of PixelPress (www.pixelpress.org), Associate Professor of Photography and Imaging at New York University, and former Picture Editor for the New York Times Magazine. Eduardo Galeano's books have been translated into more than twenty languages. He is the winner of the Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom. Lélia Wanick Salgado conceived, created, and edited almost all of Sebastião Salgado's books, as well as most of his exhibitions. She is the Director of Amazonas Images.

"While art should speak for itself, Salgado's photography is first and foremost a documentary way of bearing witness to something else. His work is both an anguished cri de coeur and, although he professes not to be religious, something of a votive offering presented in the hopes of getting the attention of a world that sometimes seems to have fallen asleep."—Orville Schell, from the Foreword

Publishers Weekly

Shot over 15 months during 1984-1985 as a horrific famine raged across sub-Saharan Africa, Salgado's documentation of the Sahel region (including parts of Chad, Ethiopia, Mali and the Sudan) was one of his first projects as he transitioned from working economist to photographer. More than 50 prizes and many books and exhibitions later, this edition brings that early work into the States in book form for the first time. Each of the 80 or so b&w shots is given a full page with generous borders; that photos of people near death are beautifully composed and printed make for just two of their paradoxes. Orville Schell argues in his foreword that "[Salgado's] strategy is to pull us into the subject with visual seduction, and then once we are enthralled-or shocked, as the case may be-to educate us about the issue at hand." With the genocide and displacement of black Africans by their Arab northern compatriots in the Sudan currently leading to serious food shortages, Salgado's book remains at the very least a relevant call to action. Portions of the profits of the book will be donated to Doctors Without Borders. (Oct.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Foreword
Sahel: Man in Distress / Orville Schell

Introduction
Twenty Years Ago, and Later / Fred Ritchin

Photographs

Captions

Afterword Salgado / Eduardo Galeano

Biographical Note Acknowledgments