Sebastião Salgado
Trained as an economist, then spent forty years photographing labour, migration and the last wild places.
Sebastião Salgado was born in Minas Gerais in Brazil in 1944, took a doctorate in economics and was working for the International Coffee Organization when he changed course to photography in 1973. The projects are long and are conceived as books and exhibitions rather than assignments: Workers, on manual labour worldwide, including the Serra Pelada gold mine; Migrations, on displacement; Genesis, on landscapes and peoples largely untouched by industry; and Amazonia. With his wife Lelia he replanted the deforested family land in Brazil, now an Atlantic Forest reserve. He worked in black and white throughout and died in 2025.
Prints are editioned and exist in several sizes, most commonly as gelatin silver prints; later pigment prints of the same images are a separate category and the two are regularly conflated. Edition size varies between image and format, so the certificate and the verso markings identify the work rather than the picture doing so. Signature is usually in pencil on the verso or the margin, with a title and edition number, and Amazonas Images documentation is the reference. The books are a serious collecting field in their own right.
If you own a work by Sebastião Salgado
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.