The legendary first book by Sebastião Salgado, a point of reference for documentary work. The Italian edition holds the original texts by Claude Nori, who tells how the book came about, by Salgado himself and by Gonzalo Torrente Ballester, together with Alan Riding’s introduction to the American edition. First published in 1986 by Contrejour, the volume gathers pictures made on the many journeys Salgado undertook in Latin America between 1977 and 1984: a body of images that speaks with great evocative force of how the peasant and Indian cultures of those lands persist. The intensity of the black and white, its plastic power and the layout devised by Lélia Wanick Salgado, with most of the images running across two pages, made the project a success; it won the Premier Livre Photo and was a great publishing event. "When I began this work in 1977," the author writes, "my only wish was to go home, to that beloved Latin America. Armed with a whole arsenal of chimeras, I decided to plunge into the heart of that unreal universe, of these Latin Americas so mysterious, suffering, heroic and full of nobility. The work lasted seven years, or rather seven centuries for me, because I was going back in time."