[5] Much of his career has involved using photography to preserve the history of groups of people in danger of being ignored and forgotten and encouraging his subjects to retrieve memories and tell their stories.
The "Family of Luis" essay led to Salzmann's being hired as a participant observer and photographer by St. Luke's Hospital Department of Community Psychiatry for a joint project with Columbia University.
A Fulbright grant enabled Salzmann to spend 1974 – 1976 in the small Romanian town of Radauti, documenting the lives of the remaining members of its Jewish community who had survived the Holocaust.
This project took 5 years to complete and culminated in an exhibit, Anyos Munchos I Buenos, that was shown in museums in Israel, the Netherlands, Germany, France, and the United States, in addition to two books, and a documentary film.
His study of young wrestlers, titled La Lucha/The Struggle,[21] were accompanied by gouache paintings by Cuban artist Luis El Estudiante.
[22] Writing of the work, Miles Orvell wrote, "Salzmann's photographs constitute an aesthetic and social document of great power...and are a tribute to his generous vision of cross-cultural understanding.” [23] Salzmann also published more experimental, abstract photographs from Cuba in Imagining Cutumba, which takes as its subjects one of Cuba's oldest dance companies, the Ballet Folklórico Cutumba.
[24] Between 2005 and 2008, Salzmann photographed the life that some Mexican immigrants in Philadelphia left behind in the Sierra Norte de Puebla, a mountainous, rural region of Mexico.