Sahlan Hayes was born in the United Kingdom and lived with his family in the USA and New Zealand before settling in Australia. After working as a cadet photographer in Sydney for the Australian in the late 1980s, he returned to England in 1991 to work freelance. Since 1994, he has been a full-time photographer with the Sydney Morning Herald, undertaking news, features and portraiture assignments. Apart from his portrait photographs of many prominent Australian and international figures, he has documented the refugee crisis in Croatia during the war, the northern migration of humpback whales along the east coast of NSW and the discovery of prehistoric human remains in Flores, Indonesia.