Sebastião Salgado

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Sebastião Salgado gives to the Brazilian president Lula da Silva his new book. October 31, 2006.

Sebastião Salgado (born 1944 in Aimorés, Minas Gerais, Brazil) is an illustrious Brazilian photographer and photojournalist.

After a somewhat itinerant childhood, Salgado initially trained as an economist, earning a master’s degree in economics from Sao Paulo University in Brazil. He began work as an economist for the International Coffee Organization, often traveling to Africa on missions for the World Bank, when he first started seriously taking photographs. He chose to abandon a career as an economist and switched to photography in 1973, working initially on news assignments before veering more towards documentary-type work. Salgado initially worked with the Paris based agency Gamma, but in 1979 he joined the international cooperative of photographers Magnum Photos. He left Magnum in 1994 and formed his own agency Amazonas Images in Paris to represent his work. He is particularly noted for his documentary photography of workers in less developed nations. Longtime gallery director Hal Gould considers Salgado to be the most important photographer of the early 21st century, and gave him his first show in the United States. Salgado works on long term, self assigned projects many of which have been published as books: The Other Americas, Sahel, Workers, and Exodus. His most famous pictures are of a gold mine in Brazil called Serra Pelada. He is presently working on a project called 'Genesis' photographing the landscape, flora and fauna of places on earth that have not been taken over by man.