Sebastião Salgado is a French-Brazilian photographer.

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 harmony with their ancestral traditions and cultures. This body of work was conceived as a potential path to humanity’s rediscovery of itself in nature.

Lélia Wanick Salgado and Sebastião have worked since the 1990s on the restoration of a part of the Atlantic Forest in Brazil, turning this land into a nature reserve, where they created the Instituto Terra, dedicated to a mission of reforestation, conservation and environmental education.

Salgado and his work are the focus of the documentary film The Salt of the Earth (2014), co-directed by Wim Wenders and Juliano Ribeiro Salgado. The film received a special award at Cannes Film Festival, and won the 2014 Audience Award at the San Sebastián International Film Festival, the 2015 Audience Award at the Tromsø International Film Festival and the César Award for Best Documentary Film at the 40th César Awards. It was also nominated for the best Documentary Feature at the 2015 Academy Awards.

Salgado just completed a photographic project about Brazil’s Amazon forest and its inhabitants, the indigenous communities; it aims to raise awareness on the threats they face from illegal logging, gold mining, dam building, cattle and soybean farming and, increasingly, from climate change. This work will be presented in the form of books and exhibitions in 2021.

Salgado is a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador. He was awarded the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund Grant in 1982, Foreign Honorary Membership of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1992, and the Royal Photographic Society's Centenary Medal and Honorary Fellowship (HonFRPS) in 1993. He has been a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts at the Institut de France since April 2016. In 2019, Salgado was elected Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, USA, and honored with the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, Germany.