Sebastião Salgado began his career as a professional photographer in Paris in 1973 and subsequently worked with the photo agencies Sygma, Gamma, and Magnum Photos. In 1994, he and his wife Lélia Wanick Salgado created Amazonas Images, which is today their studio, and exclusively handles his work. Salgado"s photographic projects have been featured in many exhibitions as well as books, including Sahel. L"Homme en détresse (1986), Other Americas (1986), Workers (1993), Terra (1997), Migrations (2000), The Children (2000), Africa (2007), Genesis (2013), The Scent of a Dream (2015), Kuwait. A Desert on Fire (2016), and Gold (2019).

Alan Riding is a Brazilian-born British author and former long-time foreign correspondent for The New York Times. Having served as the paper"s bureau chief in Mexico, Brazil, and France as well as its European arts correspondent, he is now writing for the theatre. A resident of Paris like Sebastião Salgado, the two have been friends and collaborators since the early 1980s.

Lélia Wanick Salgado studied architecture and urban planning in Paris. Her interest in photography started in 1970. In the 1980s, she began to conceive and design the majority of Sebastião Salgado"s photography books and all of the exhibitions of his work. Since 1994, Lélia Wanick Salgado has been the director of Amazonas Images (until 2017) and their Paris studio.