Exodus
by Sebastião Salgado

Sebastião Salgado latest exhibition is a timely reminder of how war, oppression and inequality affect ordinary people. Entitled Exodus, and including images from his Migrations and Children series, the collection explores the lives of the globe's wandering masses; individuals and families forced to relinquish their roots to escape persecution and poverty. While many leave their homes full of hope for the future, the reality of life in fetid tower blocks and disease-ridden shanty towns soon hits home. The faces that linger in these images speak not of Shangri-La but of crumbling hope, despair and loss.

The drive to capture the world's shifting populations on film took Brazilian-born Salgado to Rwanda, Mozambique, Hong Kong, USA, Italy, Lebanon and beyond. Between 1993 and 1999, he adopted the itinerant life of his subjects, living in refugee camps, fleeing war-zones and sheltering in graffiti-adorned ghettos. The resulting images draw conflicting emotions; harshness is tempered with humility, terror with beauty. In one image body parts of murdered Rwandans floating below a waterfall resemble a comically arranged artists model. In another, South Vietnamese children play innocently within the impenetrable barbed-wire confines of a Hong Kong refugee camp.

While images such as this hint at the grim reality of war, others are more blatant. Most memorable for its horror is a scene taken of a schoolroom in Rwanda. A shaft of soft sunlight emphasises the contours of decomposing bodies, still there one year after a massacre. The scene is at once peaceful and terrifying. Salgado has been criticised in the past for creating scenes of beauty from horror but he insists he simply captures what he sees. "I respect the basic rules of composition and light. I don't put anyone in the picture. The light is there, the people are there and I just take the picture. But the land we live on is a very beautiful place. The movement and form of nature are beautiful."

An admirer and contemporary of James Nachtwey and Josef Koudelka, Salgado remains very much a purist. Primarily using three lenses - 28, 35 and 60mm - he only shoots black and white and never crops his pictures. Now aged 59, he considers it "too late" for him to embrace digital technology. "For me, photography is a very animal act, it's instinctive," he says. "You're there and once you've pressed the button it's a 95 per cent finished product. Images are the only universal language - I believe I am a storyteller."

In another section, his stories are of people forced into cities to find work. He focuses on the phenomenon of the Asian mega-city - huge metropolises such as Bombay, Shanghai, Cairo and Manila - where the rapid pace of development has demanded a huge, cheap workforce. In Shanghai, an area of city the size of greater London has sprung up in a decade. But while the mirror-clad hotels and office blocks sparkle with wealth and glamour, the scenes of labourers building them tell a different tale. Their experience is of life in the hinterlands that are neither town nor country; soul-less outskirts where sheep graze the dirt below motorway bridges and workers sit in windows to escape the oppressive heat of their bleak tower-block cells.

The disparity between the haves and have-nots of this planet is an issue dear to Salgado's heart. He considers himself part of the anti-globalisation protest movement and believes that people in the rich West misunderstand many migrants. "People talk about migrants in a bad way, they say they break the system and are not nice,' he says. 'But the problem is that a big part of humanity does not have wealth. When we give work to African people to make tea or coffee that price is fixed here. They are selling their products at a negative price - and they are paying us with their health. We need to find a solution that will suit the whole of humanity. I believe that this work will help to start the debate." CF