Sebastião Salgado

Sebastião Salgado (Brazilian, b.1944) is a documentary photographer and photojournalist best known for his work covering Africa and Latin America and his collaborations with humanitarian organizations. He was working on a PhD in agricultural economics and working for the International Coffee Organization in Africa when he began taking photographs and decided to become a professional photojournalist. His first assignments were for the Sygma and Gamma agencies, including a long essay about the peasants of Latin America, published as the book Other Americas in 1986. His book Workers, published in 1993, encompasses a larger project of documenting industrial laborers across 23 countries. His next project, Migrations, begun in 1993 and published in 2005, features peoples from 43 countries who moved from the countryside to cities. In 1984, Salgado began a series of photographs documenting the African famine for exhibitions and two books to support the organization Doctors Without Borders. He has received several awards, including the W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography, and is a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador.