It was on his travels to Africa that Salgado first started seriously taking photographs. He chose to abandon a career as an economist and switched to photography in 1973, working initially on news assignments before veering more towards documentary-type work. Salgado initially worked with the photo agency
Sygma and the Paris-based
Gamma, but in 1979, he joined the international cooperative of photographers
Magnum Photos. He left Magnum in 1994 and with his wife
Lélia Wanick Salgado formed his own agency, Amazonas Images, in Paris, to represent his work. He is particularly noted for his social documentary photography of workers in less developed nations. His work resides in Paris. Salgado worked on long-term, self-assigned projects, many of which have been published as books:
The Other Americas,
Sahel,
Workers,
Migrations, and
Genesis. The aforementioned three are mammoth collections with hundreds of images each from all around the world. His most famous pictures are of a
gold mine in Brazil called
Serra Pelada, taken between 1986 and 1989. He was also a
UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador since 2001. Between 2004 and 2011, Salgado worked on
Genesis, aiming at the presentation of the unblemished faces of nature and humanity. It consists of a series of photographs of landscapes and wildlife, as well as of human communities that continue to live in accordance with their ancestral traditions and cultures. This body of work is conceived as a potential path to humanity's rediscovery of itself in nature. In September and October 2007, Salgado displayed his photographs of coffee workers from India, Guatemala, Ethiopia, and Brazil at the
Brazilian Embassy in London. The aim of the project was to raise public awareness of the origins of the popular drink. Salgado photographed the landscape and people of the
Amazon rainforest (Amazônia) in Brazil. Salgado's work has been described by
Andrei Netto of
The Guardian as an "instantly recognisable combination of black-and-white composition and dramatic lighting". ==Environmentalism==