Sebastião Salgado has been awarded more than fifty international prizes from countries including France, Germany, Holland, Spain, Sweden, Japan, and the United States. He has twice been named Photojournalist of the Year by the International Center of Photography in New York. He is a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador and an honorary member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences in the United States. Major exhibitions of his work include Sahel: L'Homme en détresse (1986), Other Americas (1986), An Uncertain Grace (1990), Workers: An Archaeology of the Industrial Age (1993), Migrations: Humanity in Transition (2000), and The Children: Refugees and Migrants (2000).

Orville Schell is Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.

Fred Ritchin is Director of PixelPress (www.pixelpress.org), Associate Professor of Photography and Imaging at New York University, and former Picture Editor for the New York Times Magazine.

Eduardo Galeano's books have been translated into more than twenty languages. He is the winner of the Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom.

Lélia Wanick Salgado conceived, created, and edited almost all of Sebastião Salgado's books, as well as most of his exhibitions. She is the Director of Amazonas Images.

While art should speak for itself, Salgado's photography is first and foremost a documentary way of bearing witness to something else. His work is both an anguished cri de coeur and, although he professes not to be religious, something of a votive offering presented in the hopes of getting the attention of a world that sometimes seems to have fallen asleep.--Orville Schell, from the Foreword