“I photographed the world,” Sebastião Salgado said towards the end of his life.
“Sometimes I ask myself, ‘Sebastião, was it really you that went to all these places? Was it really me that spent years traveling to 130 different countries, who went deep inside the forests, into oil fields and mines?’”
It was, and over half a century he created a vast body of work, seeking out the farthest reaches and remotest outposts of the globe and capturing humanity in all of its suffering as well as its beauty from the Amazon to Antarctica.
Working in high-contrast black and white to convey profound truths about the world in which we live, he was by common assent one of the last great photographers in the classic, humane tradition of Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson.
He photographed famine in the Sahel, poverty in Ethiopia and genocide in Rwanda. “I was working in these places because I am part of a society that needs to see what is happening on our planet,” he said.
If the volume and quality of his work amazed, what was perhaps even more surprising was that Salgado was in his 30th year before he picked up a camera, having trained as an economist.
He started taking photographs in 1971 while traveling in Africa on a mission for the World Bank, having borrowed a camera from his wife, Lélia Wanick Salgado, who was at the time an architecture student. “When I looked for the first time through the viewfinder, I understood that my life had changed,” he said.
Two years later, he abandoned the career for which he had trained and took on the high-risk challenge of making his way as a professional photographer. At the time he was living in London and “making a huge amount of money” as chief economist for the International Coffee Organization under the auspices of the United Nations. “We gave up everything to start from ground zero,” he recalled.
Working initially on news assignments, he later moved to a more documentary style, sometimes devoting months or even years to a project. He spent two months walking the Arctic wastes of Siberia with the indigenous nomadic Nenets, living in their tepees and hunting with them using bows and arrows in temperatures that dropped as low as minus 45C.
There were almost 50 trips into the Amazon rainforest, living with and documenting the lives of indigenous communities, from their hunting and fishing expeditions to their age-old dances and rituals. The resulting pictures were anthologized as a 500-page book and presented in an exhibition titled Amazonia, which toured the world and went on display at the Science Museum in London in 2021.
If he was part anthropologist and part sociologist, economics also remained an essential prism through which he looked at the world, and with his camera he captured the harsh lives of manual laborers from the gold mines of Brazil to the oil wells of Kuwait. Together with pictures of textile workers, coal miners, tea pickers, and others from all over the developing world, they were collected in the monumental 1993 book Workers: An Archaeology of the Industrial Age.
He called the book an “homage to the working class” and the disparity between rich and poor, owners and workers, producers and consumers affronted his sense of humanity, as he made clear in the introduction. “So the planet remains divided, the First World in a crisis of excess, the Third World in a crisis of need,” he wrote.
There were further books collecting together his pictures of refugees and migrants, with whom he had equal sympathy. “I grew up in a Third World country and I see the injustice that we have on this Earth. I have a big hope that we can have a better way to live, a better situation for the health of our planet, and better social protection for everyone,” he said.
The horrors he witnessed in Rwanda in 1994 were “a moment of deep disillusionment with my own kind” that shook him so badly he considered abandoning photography altogether. Instead, in his sixties he sought and found redemption in nature, photographing the Earth’s pristine places, undertaking an epic eight-year expedition traveling by foot, light aircraft, ship, canoe and even hot air balloon to locations that have to date managed to escape the bespoiling imprint of modern civilization.
Ranging from icebergs in the Antarctic to the iguanas of Galápagos, the pictures were collected in the 2012 book Genesis, which he called his “love letter to the planet”.
His books were compiled in association with his wife, whom he met when they were both teenagers. They married in 1967 and she acted as his curator and director of his photo agency Amazonas Images. “I can’t say where I end and where Lélia begins,” he said.
She survives him along with their two children, Rodrigo, who has Down’s syndrome, and Juliano, a filmmaker who with Wim Wenders co-directed the 2014 film Salt of the Earth celebrating his father’s work.
Sebastião Ribeiro Salgado was born in 1944 in Aimorés, Brazil, in the mountainous state of Minas Gerais, where his parents owned a large cattle ranch in the Rio Doce Valley. He was the only boy among eight children. In later life he restored the ranch to forest, undoing decades of environmental degradation, by planting hundreds of thousands of trees.
After earning two degrees in economics in Brazil he fled the country to escape the brutal authoritarianism of its military dictatorship—he was at the time a member of a radical Marxist faction—and did his PhD in Paris, where he kept a home for the rest of his life.
Once he had switched to photography, he was prepared to suffer for his art. He lived with a blood disorder from improperly treated malaria caught in Indonesia and a spinal problem caused by a land mine that blew up his vehicle in 1974 during Mozambique’s war of independence.
As one of the world’s most prodigious chroniclers of the human condition he leaves a legacy of between 500,000 and 700,000 images. “I’m probably one of the photographers who’s created the most work in the history of photography,” he said in his final interview. It wasn’t a boast; he seemed genuinely astonished by his own industry.
“It’s not pride that I feel—it’s a fascination. The best moments of my life were going into new worlds, going to meet people, going to discover,” he said. “Going to see things I’d never seen before.”
And, he might have added, opening the eyes of the world by sharing them.
Sebastião Salgado was born on February 8, 1944. He died on May 23, aged 81
