Photo Essay: Outcast — Displaced People of the World

The Refugees: Tanzania, 1994; Thousands of displaced Rwandans struggled to protect themselves from the elements at the Benako, Tanzania refugee camp

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Photographs by Sebastião Salgado-Amazonas-Contact Press Images from the book "Migrations" ©2000 by Sebastião Salgado (Aperture Foundation)

Fast action photography is no great trick anymore. What's harder to pin down are the slower but more decisive motions that make the great arcs of history. Over the past decade the photographer Sebastião Salgado traveled across five continents to observe the great relocations of people caused by war, famine and the whiplashings of the global economy. In Africa, Asia and the Balkans, war produced millions of refugees. In Asia and Latin America the simple but still desperate search for work moved millions to the packed cities. The pictures on this and the following pages, from his new book Migrations (Aperture; 431 pages; $100), are a portrait of what Salgado calls "the reorganization of the human family".

Salgado's images are successors to the lost tradition of history painting, They remind us that battlefields are mostly piled with civilian casualties, that the developed world, so plump and abundant, is home to the lucky few and that the epic of our time remains what it was before our time, the everyday struggle to survive.

By Richard Lacayo