Photographer of the Week: Sebastião Salgado

Twice named Photographer of the Year by the International Center of Photography, Sebastião Salgado is a socially-conscious photographer from Brazil. Born in 1944 in Aimorés, he was raised on a farm with his seven sisters. He worked as an economist for the International Coffee Organization until he was 26 years old, when he decided to become a photojournalist instead.

Photograph from Genesis by Sebastião Salgado

He has traveled around the world as both a photojournalist and a documentary photographer, documenting the hardship and strife on the natural world caused by industrialization.

Mr. Salgado has published many books of photography, starting with Other Americas in 1986, which featured pictures he took of rural peasants in Latin America. Next he worked with Doctors Without Borders to document famine in Africa in two books: Sahel: Man in Distress and Sahel: The End of the Road. His next book, Workers, published in 1993, showed the workers of large-scale industrial and agricultural operations. He began work on Migrations around this time to document people migrating en masse due to industrialization. Migrations was published in 2000. In 2004 he began working on Genesis, showing the undeveloped natural world in the most remote regions of the planet. Genesis was published in 2013.

Works cited: http://www.biography.com/people/sebastião-salgado-40046