Images of the Human Landscape : Photography: From Rwanda’s civil war to his eight-year ‘Workers’ project, Sebastiao Salgado documents life’s harsh realities.

Sebastiao Salgado is not as well as he appears. The photographer has just returned from the refugee camps of Tanzania, the war-ravaged streets and hills of Rwanda, the slowly rebuilding society of Mozambique, only to find himself suffering from malaria.

The Brazilian-born photographer, whose work can be seen at the Fahey/Klein Gallery through Sept. 3, seems relaxed and fit enough this morning in his Paris loft, surrounded by black-and-white prints, posters and magazines featuring some of his epic, emotionally rich images of beauty and profound suffering.

But there is an acute seriousness in Salgado’s face, the crisp blue eyes, the graying red mustache. Still attached to his wristwatch is the compass that helped him return after following refugees deep into the bush of Mozambique. Beneath his sweater a trio of abscesses fester on his body, a symptom of a bacterial infection.

“But that’s nothing, that’s nothing,” Salgado, 49, says in English, one of four languages he speaks. He notes that he will travel to Africa several times this year. “What’s important is that you believe this work is important, that this is your life, that you must tell something that is happening.”

That work has in the last decade made Salgado one of the most influential, if sometimes controversial, documentary photographers now working. His recent pictures of Rwanda’s civil war horrors--of men, women and children turned into refugees, or butchered by the tens of thousands--offer a grim, ravaged human landscape, published simultaneously in Paris Match, the New York Times Magazine and Germany’s Stern magazine.

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Salgado’s massive eight-year “Workers” project, which documented the final days of manual labor, before machines and computers finally took over production, is the subject of at least five museum and gallery shows touring the world. The recently completed “Workers” photos were published as a 400-page book last year by Aperture; several of those works, from the shipyards of Europe to the raw tea fields of pre-war Rwanda, are on display at the Fahey/Klein Gallery.

Some of Salgado’s first professional photographs were taken in the early 1970s in Rwanda, where he still has friends, now missing. “It was not a good sensation,” he says of his most recent visit in June. “It was a very, very hard time. I tell you, at this moment I was not proud to be part of the human specimen. I saw how violent we are, how hard we are.”

Such feelings often are raised in Salgado’s work. His tradition is that of the “concerned photographer,” epitomized by W. Eugene Smith, who helped define the expressive power of the photo-essay in the pages of the original Life magazine. Salgado’s 1986 series on the workers of Serra Pelada, Brazil, for example, reveals an ocean of 50,000 grime-covered men laboring like drones in an open-pit gold mine, and dramatizes the extreme hardships humans can withstand while retaining some measure of dignity.

Another photograph, of a small, painfully malnourished child being weighed on a scale in Ethiopia is agonizing to see, but somehow poetic in its composition.

This aesthetic commitment to an emotional, romantic, even spiritual view of the developing world has earned some criticism. In a notorious 1991 New Yorker magazine piece, Ingrid Sischy suggested Salgado’s immense reputation was exaggerated, and wrote that his “beatification of tragedy results in pictures that ultimately reinforce our passivity toward the experience they reveal.”

But Salgado rejects standards often used by some fine arts critics, which tend to focus on one single image at a time as an independent art object.

“For me, this is a completely wrong way to look inside of the work. This is a project of life, this kind of documentary photography. This is linked to a flow of information,” he says.

“In the beginning it hurt me a lot,” he says of the criticism. “I thought that people didn’t understand. In the end, that became a matter you cannot control. You must continue to do your work.”

Salgado’s discovery of photography came relatively late. He was already working as an economist, and just finished work on a doctorate degree, when his wife, architect Lelia Wanick Salgado, bought a 35mm camera in 1970 for her work.

“The first day I looked inside this camera, and I said, ‘My God, this is a fantastic way to approach people, to look inside people, to have another communication.’ Then I began to take pictures. One month later I had a darkroom to do prints myself. I got more lenses. It was a real invasion of my life that came over me.”

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Salgado says his expressive visual style is rooted in his childhood, in the tiny town of Aimores, Brazil, where he was the son of a cattle rancher and the brother of seven sisters.

His first professional work as a photographer began in 1973 when the World Council of Churches sent him to document famine in Ethiopia. He still takes special assignments from Save the Children and other aid groups, but he was soon hired by the Sygma and Gamma news photography agencies, where he worked for six years, traveling from one news hot spot to another.

“For me it was my school of journalism,” he recalls of those years. “I learned how to arrive in a place, make an analysis of the situation, shoot, have it on a plane and sent back to the newsweekly, go on to the next place. This was very interesting, very exciting to do. But it is a school like any school; when you finish you must go. And I went. That was not my place.”

Today, Salgado is deep into personal projects. His main obsession for the next six to eight years will be another documentary work, similar to the scale of “Workers.” This one will examine the displacement of large numbers of people: immigrants, refugees and others. The new pictures from Rwanda, Tanzania and elsewhere are part of that. He’ll also spend many months photographing Arab and African immigrants in Europe and expects to be in Southern California to document the continuing migration into North America.

* Fahey/Klein Gallery, 148 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 934-2250, Tuesdays-Saturdays, 10 a.m.-6 p.m., through Sept. 3.