The photographer

Sebastião Ribeiro Salgado was born on February 8th, 1944 in Aimorés, in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil. At 16 he moved to the adjacent Vitoria, where he finished high school and began his university studies. In 1967 he married Lélia Deluiz Wanick. After further studies in São Paulo, the two moved first to Paris and then to London, where Sebastião worked as an economist for the International Coffee Organization. In 1973 he returned with his wife to Paris to begin a career as a photographer. He first worked as a freelance photograher and then for Sygma, Gamma and Magnum photo agencies.Afterword he created together with Lelia the Amazonas Images agency. Sebastião travelled a lot, dealing first with Latin American indios and peasants, then in the mid Eighties with famine in Africa. These images can be seen together in his first books. Between 1986 and 2001, he mainly devoted himself to two projects. First, in the book La mano dell’uomo, (Contrasto, 1994) he documented the end of the large-scale industrial workforce. He promoted his book in exhibitions in seven Italian towns. Then he reported humanity on the move, not only refugees and displaced people, but also migrants directed towards the immense megalopolis of the Third World, in two very successful books: In cammino and Ritratti di bambini in cammino. (Contrasto, 2000).