SALGADO, SEBASTIAO
Brazil, 1944

Born in 1944 in Aimorés, Minas Gerais, Brazil, the sixth child and only boy in a family of eight children, the son of a cattle rancher, Sebastião Ribeiro Salgado studied economics in Brazil (1964-1967) and earned his M.A. in economics in 1968 from the University of São Paulo and Vanderbilt University (USA). In 1971 he completed his coursework for his Ph.D. in economics at the University of Paris and worked as an economist for the International Coffee Organization until 1973.

After borrowing his wife Lélia's camera on a trip to Africa, in 1973 he decided to switch to photography and joined the Sygma photo agency (1974-75) followed by the Gamma agency (1975-1979). He then was elected to membership in the international cooperative, Magnum Photos, and remained with the organization from 1979-94. From his base in Paris he covered news events such as wars in Angola and the Spanish Sahara, the taking of Israeli hostages in Entebbe, the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan, and also started to pursue more personal and in-depth documentary projects.

For seven years (1977-1984) he roamed Latin America, his native region, walking to remote mountain villages to produce the images for his eventual book and exhibition Other Americas (1986), a meditative exploration of peasant cultures and the cultural resistance of Indians and their descendants in Mexico and Brazil. In the mid-1980s he worked for fifteen months with the French aid group Doctors Without Borders in the drought-stricken Sahel region of Africa and created Sahel: L'Homme en Détresse (Sahel: Man in Distress) (1986), a document on the dignity and endurance of people in their deepest suffering. From 1986 to 1992 he focused on Workers (1993), a documentary shot in 26 countries on the end of large-scale manual labor. After Terra: Struggle of the Landless (1997), a project on those fighting to reclaim their land in his native country of Brazil, Salgado published Migrations and The Children (2000) on the plight of displaced persons, refugees and migrants in 41 countries.

A world-renowned photographer and part of the tradition of "concerned photography," Sebastião Salgado has been awarded virtually every major photographic prize and award in recognition of his accomplishments from institutions around the world. In 1994 he founded his own press agency, Amazonas Images, which represents him and his work. He lives in Paris with his wife and collaborator Lélia Wanick Salgado, who has designed most of his books. They have two sons.