Sage Sohier and Sebastião Salgado

SAGE SOHIER

I could not just leave the blog so lonely mentioning just one artist of portraits.
More than anything because my own project is going to have more than one person per portrait and, going over Sage Sohier's work, looks like she can give me a lot of inspiration. Plus, the project is supposed to portrait people in an environment that represents them or catch the essence of the people potraited. I think that something she achieve

I haven't been able to find dates of birth of this artist but, for what I've seen online, she still alive.
She was one of the 80's rebels and she even photographed same-sex couples in that decade, where the LGTB movement was starting to become visible but was not completely accepted in society.

I am sadly surprised on how little information I've been able to find on her and her life in the internet. Lucky me, there were a lot of things about her work.

What I like about her is that sense of familiarity her pictures show. The naturalness, spontaneity and comfort her models show in her work.
While her color photography is more centered around her mom and, which is one of my passions, rescued animals, her black and white is more about people: people with their loved ones, people in their daily lives, people having a break from a hard-working day, people enjoying with the little ones... I found it beautiful in its simplicity.

SEBASTIÃO SALGADO

He is a Brazilian social documentary photographer and photojournalist. He's also a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador and has several awards. 

He started as an economist and often travelled to Africa on missions for the World Bank, where he first started seriously taking photographs. He abandoned economics to photograph in 1973. He was 30 years old. I am 31, maybe it's not too late for me to do the same switch ^_^

He formed his own agency in 1994 and he's particularly noted for his social documentary photography of workers in less developed nations or undernourished children in Africa.

Female authors as Susan Sontag or Ingrid Sischy have critized him because he does not give any kind of importance to the individuals on his work. He's very aware of the sense of community since he spends a lot of time to finish their series (years) but he does not give names of the people he photographs which, according to these and other authors, helps to create this sense of contemplation instead of action. His control over the light and composition idealize the children and workers giving the photographer the spotlight, leaving the people photographed in a second place. And this is really revealing and shocking since what he photographs is women, men and children in hard-working conditions or with a serious level of undernourishment. In my opinion is almost like capturing death before it takes over the bodies of these people.

I wonder if he does something afterwards to help this communities or if he just saw them in the verge of dying to collect his money after an exposition.