Sebastião Salgado made the forty-nine black-and-white photographs in Other Americas between 1977 and 1984, working across Brazil, Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru, Guatemala, and Mexico. Rather than treating Latin America as a single, coherent territory, the book draws together encounters with spiritual and religious observance, rural transformation, and domestic life. Its continental scope is anchored in particular people, places, and gestures.

First published in France in 1986, Other Americas was Salgado’s first book. It established an early form for the socially engaged reportage that would define his subsequent practice: attentive to broad historical conditions, yet dependent on the expressive force of individual moments. Faces and bodies are not presented merely as evidence of circumstance. They convey the reciprocal awareness between photographer and subject, while landscapes register both livelihood and change.

The book was designed by Léila Wanick Salgado, whose role makes it important to consider the work as a constructed publication rather than simply a portfolio of notable images. Across forty-nine photographs, the movement among ritual, labor, countryside, and private interiors creates a layered account of communities bound to their surroundings. Alan Riding’s accompanying text further frames the photographs as a view onto forms of life often kept outside dominant representations of the Americas.

Published by Aperture in 2015, this 127-page hardcover returns attention to a formative work in Salgado’s career. For collectors, its significance rests in the convergence of an early documentary project, a sustained geographic and social inquiry, and the book design through which that inquiry received its lasting form. Other Americas rewards close reading not only photograph by photograph, but as an authored sequence in which intimacy and continental history remain in productive tension.