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We spoke again in March 1987 after he had edited and printed the story, but when I suggested that one of the bigger magazines might buy it, he thought it unlikely because the mine had been photographed many times before. He asked me to take the story to Granta, a respected literary magazine that sometimes publishes photoessays.

That had got him to South America, but he had shot the story in his own time, spending his own money. He believed he had shot a good set of pictures on what was his first story for Workers, having piggy-backed his trip on a paid assignment. Salgado called me in October he had just returned from Brazil where he had photographed a gold mine known as Serra Pelada.

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It was madly ambitious, and I struggled to think how to even begin pitching the idea to editors in London.

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Even back then I recognised that his Workers proposal – to photograph 42 different stories on manual labour around the world – was going to be a hard sell. I first met Sebastião Salgado at Magnum’s AGM in Paris later that year. When I named some of the founders, his reply was “Cartier-Bresson? That’s a posh watch, isn’t it?” Coming from an environment where an idea for a project might take two or three years to come to fruition, moving into a world where a telephone call could result in a commission that would be shot, edited and published within six weeks, was a liberating experience. A number of picture editors expressed surprise that the agency still existed with one young man, heading up the desk of a daily newspaper, claiming not to have heard of it at all. At that time, Magnum’s profile in London was not very high. My job was to traipse around London visiting magazines and newspapers to sell stories and pitch new ideas to commissioning editors. Initially I worked out of a small office off Gray’s Inn Road with a couple of phone lines and a filing cabinet that quickly filled with new photo stories sent every week by Magnum’s offices in New York and Paris. I had spent the past half decade running Open Eye, a publicly funded photography gallery in Liverpool, and moving to a new city and into the world of journalism and commerce was very exciting. In spring 1986 I moved to London to become the director of Magnum Photos’ first new office in nearly 40 years.

Visit the BJP Shop to purchase the magazine here. This article was originally published in issue #7887 of British Journal of Photography magazine.