Sebastião Salgado: Documenting Humanity Sebastião Salgado (1944–2025) was a Brazilian social documentary photographer and photojournalist who was known for his black-and-white images that focus on human labor, migration, poverty and the natural world. He studied economics before turning to photography in the early 1970s and he worked in more than 120 countries. He founded the agency Amazonas Images in 1994 with his wife, Lélia Wanick Salgado. He created major long-term projects such as Workers,