Workers (First Edition, Signed)

Salgado’s epic photographic elegy to manual labour across the world, in the first edition, signed by the photographer.

Workers is the monumental account of manual labour that Sebastião Salgado (1944–2025) made after An Uncertain Grace. It was published by Aperture in 1993 to accompany a major touring exhibition that opened at the Philadelphia Museum of Art that April. The book, conceived and designed by Lélia Wanick Salgado, carries Salgado’s own texts and captions, an introduction by Salgado and Eric Nepomuceno, and a translation by Alan Riding. It pays tribute to the tradition of manual labour at a time when machines were replacing human workers, and it records men and women at work in some of the harshest conditions, among them the gold miners of Serra Pelada in Brazil, sulphur workers in Indonesia and the burning oil wells of Kuwait. Salgado was an economist by training, and a contemporary review noted his lament, in the accompanying text, for the global exploitation of manual workers.

Workers is a landmark of the photobook and is cited in the Magnum Photobook catalogue raisonné. Taschen reissued it in 2024, but a signed first Aperture edition remains the form collectors seek.

Workers. An Archaeology of the Industrial Age. Introduction by Sebastião Salgado and Eric Nepomuceno; conception and design by Lélia Wanick Salgado. First edition. Signed by Salgado to the half-title. Large quarto. 400pp. Photographs, texts and captions by Salgado, with some 350 duotone photographs and gatefold plates. Original publisher’s grey cloth, lettered to the spine, in the original unclipped pictorial dust jacket. Fine in a near fine dust jacket. There is some light foxing to the inner covers, but the jacket is pristine and the volume fine, with the binding tight and the contents clean, fresh and bright.

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This book is currently on display in the rare book section of our Paddington store.
If you would like more information or to arrange a viewing, please contact: rarebooks@harryhartog.com.au

Catalogue Number: HH000266