After the invention of the camera has been declared to the public in 1839, it has been used for the study of the social problems and the fixing of those problems towards the end of the century. In 1880s, the journalist Jacob Riis who thinks he could not draw attention to the problems of the immigrants with his articles and soon after from him the sociologist Lewis Hine used the power of the photograph in her studies about the child workers. When it comes to the 1930s, the successful works of Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine were known in USA and by the help of the awareness that they created, the social documentarist photographers such as Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans had brought the photographic visibility to the destructive effects of the Great Depression on the farmers. The works of Sebastião Salgado who is the representative of the social documentary photography and photojournalism in the present day, bear the stamp of the aforementioned photographers’ works. The immigrants, the workers, the children, the peasants without land and the hunger draw attention as the subjects that Salgado had dwelt on.

Key Words: Sociology, Sebastião Salgado, Social Documentary Photography.