More than those of any living photographer, Sebastiao Salgado's images of the world's poor stand as icons of the human condition. His transforming photographs bestow dignity on the most isolated and neglected, from refugees in the famine-stricken Sahel, to the men who swarm the gold mines of Brazil. Now Saigado goes beyond icons to bring us a photographic revolution of such epic scope that it transcends mere image making. These photographs form an archaeological perspective of the activities that have defined labour from the Iron Age through the Industrial Revolution to the present. This book is the vision of a man with a moral mission: he honours workers of the world with the empathy and drama only he can bring to a photograph, paying homage to those who do manual labour in our increasingly technological society.