Young Dinka Woman, Southern Sudan, 2006

Sebastião Salgado

In striking black-and-white photographs, Sebastião Salgado documents marginalized people and majestic landscapes, sometimes uniting them in the same frames. He mixes formal compositional techniques with a sense of documentary rawness; his photographs are both dramatic in scale and granular in focus. Salgado earned a PhD in economics and embraced photography while he was working at the International Coffee Organization and making frequent trips to Africa. He transitioned to freelance photojournalism and eventually joined the international photo cooperative Magnum, adopting the documentary styles of the organization’s founders Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Salgado has exhibited at institutions including the International Center of Photography, the Natural History Museum in London, the Barbican Gallery, the Deutsches Historisches Museum, and the George Eastman Museum. His work is held in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, among others. In 1985, Salgado was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Photography.