Sebastiao Salgado - La mano dell'uomo - 2009

The volume is the homage of the great photographer to manual labor, in an era when technological invasion and the information revolution gradually take the place that for centuries belonged to manual work.

With over sixty black-and-white images, selected from thirty reports, La mano dell’uomo is a project out of the ordinary and the fruit of work that lasted over six years.

An eager and attentive visual, anthropological, and economic survey across the world, in search of images that become visual archaeology.

The book unfolds along thematic pathways that guide the reader through different aspects of human work, telling stories of people—men, women, children—through everyday gestures that become episodes of a silent and arduous epic.

In its forward march, the highly industrialized world advances at a forced pace and has already mortgaged what, until recently, seemed to belong only to a distant future. In these images lies the history of an era. The photographs constitute the visual archaeology of a time known to history as the industrial revolution; an era in which men and women, through their manual labor, held the axis of the world.