From the beginning of the #1980s the Brazilian #photographer #Sebastião_Salgado has been #documenting how #slave_like #work has been supporting humanity's present #urban/#high_tech #utopia.
#Salgado is the author of many other projects like #Exodus, a collection of 300 pictures that tell the timeless story of #exile and #migration.

• photo 1: untitled, Serra Pelada's gold mine, Brazil 1986
• photo 2: The refugee camps in the “Zone Turquoise”, Rwanda 1995
• photo 3: Churchgate Station, Western Railroad Line, Bombay, India 1995
• photo 4: The mosque of Istiqlal, Jakarta, Indonesia 1996
• photo 5: Greater Burhan Oil Field, Kuwait 1991

#best_photographers #hard_realities #social_engagement #documentary #photo_journalism #world

In #1933 #Gisèle_Freund joined the many exiled Germans in Paris, amongst whom the #photographers Joseph Breitenbach and Fritz Henle. She was a Jewish and she had photographed in 1932 a violent May-Day in Frankfurt against the National Socialists.
In #1935 she #photographed the unemployed in the depressed areas in northern England.
In #1936 her #Sorbonne dissertation On Photography and Bourgeois Society was #published.
Among many #portraits of what was considered the "intellectual elite" at the time - Man Ray, Walter Benjamin, James Joyce and Frida Kahlo, for example -, in 1950 she photographed Evita Peron.
Gisèle #Freund's work, and life, are sociologically and historically so important that I invite you to read a more detailed #biography here.

• photo 1 (snapshot): May-Day rally, Frankfurt, 1932
• photo 2: Rue de la Pluie, Newcastle-on-Tyne, 1935
• photo 3: Simone de Beauvoir, Paris, 1938
• photo 4: Virginia Woolf devant la fresque de Vanessa Bell, London, 1939
• photo 5: Frida Kahlo et son médecin, New-Mexico, 1951
• photo 6: Man Ray dans son studio, Paris, 1967

#best_photographers #live_photography #history #sociology #photo_journalism #magazines #photography_books #photography

In the #1910s #August_Sander started to work on an ambitious project of "creating an inventory of the people of the #Weimar Republic", a #photographic cross-section of "all professions, all classes, all social levels", "from the unemployed worker to the industrial magnate", which he named later (in the #1920s) Man in the Twentieth Century. For this reason he is considered the #conceptualist inside the #objectively oriented #new_vision movement, and he became in fact a kind of photographic #sociologist.
Only one book of #Sander's body of #portraits was #published at the time - #1929 - under the title Face of Our Time, before the "repressive climate of the Nazis".
- photo 1: The Man of the Soil, 1910
- photo 2: Young Farmers of Westerwald, 1914
- photo 3: Coal Delivery Man, 1915
- photo 4: The Man and The Machine, 1926
- photo 4: Unemployed Man, 1928
- photo 5: Pastry Master, 1928

#best_photographers #history #new_objectivity #conceptualism #full_body_portrait

In #1890 #Jacob_Riis's impressive #photo_collection of "New York's immigrant poor and the tenements, sweatshops, streets, docks, dumps, and factories that they called home", that he started circa 1880, was published on an book titled "How the Other Half Lives".
Often shot at night with the newly-available #flash function—a #photographic tool that enabled Riis to capture legible #photos of dimly lit living conditions—the #photographs presented a grim peek into life in #poverty to an oblivious public. Jacob Riis: ...

• photo 1: Street children sleep near a grate for warmth on Mulberry Street. Circa 1890-1895
• photo 2: Lodgers rest in a crowded Bayard Street tenement that rents rooms for five cents a night and holds 12 people in a room just 13 feet long. Circa 1889-1890.
• photo 3: unknown description, NYC, 1889-90(?)

#best_photographers #history #documentary #social_reform #nyc