Sebastião Salgado presented his lecture as the 2001-2002 Avenali Chair in the Humanities at the Townsend Center for the Humanities, UC Berkeley. Educated as an economist, Salgado began his photography career in 1973. His first book, Other Americas, about the poor in Latin America, was published in 1986. From 1986 to 1992 he documented manual labour world wide, resulting in a book and exhibition called Workers. From 1993 to 1999, he turned his attention to the global phenomenon of the mass displacement of people, which resulted in the internationally acclaimed books Migrations and The Children, published in 2000.

Introduction to Near Eastern Art and Archaeology