Fotovision is now selling Sahel: The End of the Road, by Sebastião Salgado as a fundraiser. For $100 you get a book that has been signed by Salgado and carries some of his early documentary work

“Working with the humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders, Salgado documented the enormous suffering and the great dignity of the refugees in the Sahel region of Africa (Chad, Ethiopia, Mali, and the Sudan), where approximately one million people died from extreme malnutrition and related causes.”

Yes, you can get the same book at Amazon.com for $28.35 but look at it this way – you will have a priceless work of art that has been signed by the artist AND will have helped a great organization that is dedictated to documentary photography achieve its financial goals.

Go ahead and give yourself a gift this Christmas. Trust me, you'll feel good about it. And, yes, my copy is in the mail.

On December 16, 2004 The Hindu Group of Publications launched an online image library.

Pictures can be downloaded from the website by making payments through credit cards. Prices of pictures start from Rs. 500.

The website, I gather, holds 40,000 images from The Hindu's archive. The images are available for commercial use.

At about $10 an image, though, I have to wonder how much the photographers who shot these images will make. Or, is it a venture by The Hindu, for The Hindu?