Photographer Sebastiao Salgado has died aged 81. Photo / Getty Images
Photographer Sebastiao Salgado has died aged 81. Photo / Getty Images
Sebastiao Salgado, renowned for his black-and-white photography documenting conflict and poverty, has died at 81.
Salgado’s work spanned 120 countries, capturing major crises and the struggles of ordinary people.
He and his wife founded Instituto Terra, focusing on environmental restoration in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest.
Sebastiao Salgado, a globe-roving photographer inspired by the majesty of nature and the struggles of humanity, has died in Paris, aged 81.
Salgado’s black-and-white images documented conflict, poverty and remote corners of his native Brazil. , died May 23 in Paris. He was 81.
He died on May 23 fromleukaemia related to a type of malaria he contracted in 2010 while in Indonesia, a family statement said.
Salgado worked for Magnum Photos before starting his own agency. He received many of the most prestigious awards in photography and was widely acclaimed for his ability to capture rich storytelling in a single frame.
In his landmark 1986 photo essay of goldmine workers in the Para state in northern Brazil, one image showed a man encased in sweat and dirt, cresting a wooden ladder. A loaded bag from the mine floor was held by a rope around his forehead. Another scene, shot from within the mine, was a wide-angle tableau of workers climbing and digging in an ant-like flow.
Sebastiao Salgado worked primarily in black and white. Photo / Getty Images
For decades, Salgado was on hand for many of the world’s major crises – the devastating famine in Ethiopia in the 1980s, the 1991 US-led war to oust Iraqi forces from Kuwait, the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, and other upheavals. He described his mission as seeking to convey a sense of the ordinary people caught, often helpless, in the tumult.
His other projects – part of a body of work spanning 120 countries – included a series on migrants in North Africa desperate to reach Europe, and the life in slums where the immediate concerns were food and safety.
“I admit there’s a very specific message in my work,” he said in a 1990 interview with journalist Amanda Hopkinson in London. “The developing countries have never been as poor or as dependent as they are today.”
Sebastiao Salgado pictured in 2022. Photo / Getty Images
“It is time to launch the concept of the universality of humanity,” he continued. “Photography lends itself to a demonstration of this and as an instrument of solidarity between peoples.”
An economist by training, Salgado borrowed his wife’s camera in 1971 while working in London for the International Coffee Organisation. During a trip to Africa, he took photos of workers and rural life. “Four days later, I had an obsession; a fortnight later, a camera of my own,” he recounted. “Within a month, I had a darkroom.”
He sought jobs as a freelance photographer in 1973 and later contributed work to the Sygma and Gamma photo agencies. In the late 1970s, he joined Magnum, a home for some of the world’s top photographers.
Salgado stepped away from Magnum in 1994 to establish Amazonia Images with his wife, Lelia Wanick Salgado. Four years later, the couple founded the environmental group Instituto Terra, which seeks to restore stretches of Brazil’s southeastern Atlantic Forest threatened by development.
Sebastiao Salgado and his wife, Lelia, in the Salgado Studio in Paris. Photo / Getty Images
Salgado increasingly turned his lens on nature – drawing close enough to photograph the armour-like skin on a marine iguana in the Galapagos and, at other times, pulling back for vistas such as a river through the Alaskan wilderness and the sculpted curves of Antarctic icebergs.
In his “Amazonia” series, he travelled across the rainforest, taking portraits of Indigenous people and chronicling the power of the natural world, such as towering clouds rising above the forest canopy.
In a private nature reserve, he and his wife planted more than 300 species of trees as part of a rewilding project. As the trees grew, birds and insects returned. The tree roots held back erosion.
“Although we were amazed at how nature can fight back, we began to get worried about the threat to the whole planet,” Salgado told the British Journal of Photography in 2013.
“There is a strange idea that nature and humanity are different, but in fact this separation poses a great threat to humanity. We think we can control nature, but it’s easy to forget that we need it for our survival.”
Sebastiao Salgado's Amazonia features 200 large-scale photographs and video montages taken over seven years of the Amazon rainforest, remote Indigenous tribes, and the threat deforestation poses to their survival. Photo / Getty Images
Sebastiao Ribeiro Salgado jnr was born in Aimores, in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, north of Rio de Janeiro, on February 8, 1944. His family operated a cattle ranch.
In 1964, the Brazilian military seized control of the government in a coup that ousted President Joao Goulart. As the military waged crackdowns on dissent, Salgado and his wife decided to flee. They headed in 1969 to Paris, which would become their main base over the next five decades.
“If a photographer is not there, there’s no image. We need to be there,” he told Forbes Brasil. “We expose ourselves a lot. And that is why it is such an immense privilege.”
During an assignment in Washington in 1981, Salgado was among the few photographers outside a hotel as would-be assassin John Hinckley jnr opened fire on President Ronald Reagan in 1981. Salgado’s frames, shot in colour, show Secret Service agents surrounding Hinckley.
Among Salgado’s honours was the Leica Oskar Barnack Award, which he received twice, and more than 10 World Press Photo awards in categories including news feature and general news.
In addition to his wife, survivors include sons Juliano and Rodrigo, and two grandchildren. A 2014 documentary on Salgado’s life and work, The Salt of the Earth, was co-directed by Wim Wenders and Juliano.
In a memorial ceremony in Brazil’s capital, Brasilia, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva led a minute of silence and called Salgado’s photographs “a wake-up call for the conscience of all humanity”.
During an interview with the Guardian in 2024, Salgado asked: “Why should the poor world be uglier than the rich world? The light here is the same as there. The dignity here is the same as there.”
