© Sebastião Salgado

The End of Polio: A Global Effort to End a Disease, a special exhibition of works by acclaimed photojournalist Sebastião Salgado, will be on display at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History from March 5 to May 15. The exhibition, which documents the plight of polio victims and ongoing efforts to eradicate the disease throughout the world, is cosponsored by the University of Pittsburgh as part of its 50th anniversary celebration of the development of the Salk polio vaccine.

Before photography captured the imagination of Sebastião Salgado, son of a Brazilian cattle rancher, he studied economics, completed coursework for a doctorate at the University of Paris, and worked as an economist for the International Coffee Organization. In 1973, however, using a borrowed camera for a trip to Africa, he discovered his passion for photography. During the years that followed, he worked for several photo agencies; and, from 1979 to 1994, as a member of Magnum Photos, an international cooperative, he covered world news through the lens of a camera. At the same time, he began developing the in-depth photo documentaries for which he is known today and that are based on extended contact with the people in particular regions or circumstances who became the subjects of his projects. In 1994, he founded his own press agency, Amazonas Images.

The titles of Salgado’s photo essays reflect the scope of his interests and the depth of his social concerns: Other Americas (1986), Sahel: L’Homme en Détresse (Sahel: Man in Distress) (1986), Workers (1993), Terra: Struggle of the Landless (1997), Migrations (2000), and The Children (2000). Salgado’s efforts to document the global efforts to eradicate poliomyelitis took him to Somalia, Sudan, India, Pakistan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, among other places. The resulting book, The End of Polio: A Global Effort to End a Disease (2003), presents some of the more striking and memorable moments that Salgado captured. In the January 2004 issue of the Bulletin of the World Health Organization, an article about Salgado’s project quotes him as saying, “Though I had frequently visited most of the countries where polio is still a problem, I had not noticed what a terrible impact this disease still has. I was also not aware of the gigantic effort being made to eradicate it: millions of people delivering drops of polio vaccine to tens of millions of children. It is an amazing story that I wanted to help tell.”