Legendary Brazilian Photographer Sebastião Salgado Has Died At 81

Forbes

3 days ago

Sebastião Salgado at his exhibition at Les Franciscaines cultural center in Deauville
It is with deep sorrow that we bid farewell to Sebastião Salgado, one of the most visionary and compassionate photographers of our time, who passed away on May 23, 2025 in Paris from leukemia. For over five decades, he dedicated his life to bearing witness to the beauty and suffering of our world, crafting an unparalleled body of work that gave voice to the most vulnerable and revealed the fragile majesty of our planet. With his lifelong partner, Lélia Wanick Salgado, he created images that transcended photojournalism – offering instead a poetic, unflinching reflection on human dignity, resilience and the urgent need for environmental stewardship.
Together, Sebastião and Lélia not only transformed how we see the world, but actively helped to heal it through the Instituto Terra, a reforestation initiative in Aimorés in the state of Minas Gerais in his native Brazil that has planted more than three million trees. From war zones to remote landscapes, his lens never flinched, even as his own health declined after contracting a rare form of malaria in 2010 in Indonesia during his 'Genesis' project. Complications from that illness ultimately led to a severe form of leukemia that claimed his life. He leaves behind not just a towering photographic legacy, but a living testament to hope, endurance and the possibility of renewal – survived by his beloved wife, their sons Juliano and Rodrigo, and grandchildren Flávio and Nara.
Salgado's spirit will undoubtedly live on through the countless lives he touched and the timeless images he created. His work is currently being celebrated in the 'Amazônia' exhibition at Tour & Taxis in Brussels until November 9, 2025 displaying more than 200 large-format photographs that capture the breathtaking richness of the Amazon rainforest and the lives of its indigenous peoples, accompanied by an original soundtrack composed by Jean-Michel Jarre, as well as a major survey show at Les Franciscaines cultural center in Deauville, France, on view until June 1, 2025, presented in collaboration with the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris. The Q&A that follows was one of the final interviews Salgado gave before his death, offering a powerful reflection on his life's work, values and vision for the world.
Sebastião Salgado, Greater Burhan oil field, Kuwait, 1991, MEP Collection, Paris
How did your relationship with black-and-white photography begin?
At first, I did a lot of color. When I started working for the press, I had to make a living. Magazines in the '70s and '80s didn't publish black-and-white photos. All the commissions we had were in color. But never in my life was I a photographer of color. Color bothered me enormously from focusing on my image. At the time, we worked with slides, which had high-contrast colors. I knew that blues and reds were going to become hugely important visually when I looked at the final image, and it made me lose all the focus I had on a person's dignity and personality. Black and white is an abstraction. Nothing is in black and white. But there I transformed all the color ranges into grayscale, and everything became a range of grays where I could focus on wherever I wanted.
One of your most iconic projects is your documentation of the Serra Pelada gold mine in Brazil. What made that experience so powerful?
In 1986, I did a story on the gold mine in Brazil. It was discovered in 1980. I had tried to go to this mine in '80, '81, '82, '83, '84, '85. I never had permission because it was the Brazilian army that controlled this mine. I was very close to a guerrilla movement in Brazil that was the number one enemy of the army. But in 1986, they left the mine, and it was the cooperative –people who had the concession and the workers – that were in charge, and they allowed me to come. I hadn't published my photos because it wasn't worth it – magazines didn't publish in black and white at the time. They only published in color. It took at least six or seven months to get them published. But when Magnum, where I was, decided to diffuse them, Jimmy Fox, the publisher, said, 'This story is exceptional.' The Sunday Times Magazine gave me 10 pages and the cover. It was exceptional in black and white, as we hadn't published in black and white for 15 years. Right away, The New York Times Magazine did the same. Three weeks later, it was Paris Match and Stern. We broke the code of color with this story. And from then on, it was possible for me to abandon color photography and work only in black and white.
Sebastião Salgado, Serra Pelada Gold Mine, State of Pará, Brazil, 1986, MEP Collection, Paris
You've dedicated your life to long, immersive projects. What toll has this work taken on your body?
I wore out my body a lot. I had an operation on my Achilles tendon. The Istanbul police attacked me and broke my Achilles tendon. I broke my knees twice; I have a mechanical knee. I had an operation on the tendon in my left shoulder and my right shoulder tendon. I've had a lot of accidents. I broke my machine producing red and white blood cells. And I'm a little battered. At 81 years old, I'm trying to hold on a little bit, to see if I can live a few more years. The projects I did in photography were long-term projects. I've worked on stories that took me five or eight years, and if I take on a project like that now, I might not get to the end because I might disappear before then.
You've spoken about a health crisis that changed your life. What happened?
I caught a very strong form of malaria – plasmodium falciparum – the strongest of the malarias. And I treated the malaria, but my doctor in Paris, in the service of Professor Gentilini at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, said, 'Sebastião, when you get falciparum, you have to rest for at least four to six months because it attacks the whole body. You are weakened everywhere.' And I said, 'Yes, you're right.' But a fortnight later, I was on the Colorado Plateau working because I had a whole expedition organized with guides, assistants, everything, to get to this wonderful part of the world. I was so tired that I couldn't walk properly anymore. When I returned to Paris, my immunological defense was zero. I got an infection in a dental implant and had a generalized infection. I took a brutal load of antibiotics. Everything was awakened in my body, except one thing: my machine to produce white blood cells, red blood cells, platelets. It was broken. It was a kind of cancer that I caught. The doctors who treat me are doctors who treat cancer. I've been taking medication for 15 years. It more or less resolves the problem, and I can travel, work, do everything. I did a whole project in the Amazon afterwards. But then a few months ago in Brazil, my body denied these drugs that I had been taking for 15 years.
You've spoken about giving up photography after witnessing the genocide in Rwanda in the early 2000s and becoming sick. What happened?
While we were in Brazil resting, my parents became old. I am from a family of eight children. I have seven sisters, but I am the only son. And there, my parents made the decision to give our farm, the farm where I was born, to Lélia and I. And I made the decision to give up photography. Lélia and I would become farmers. We were going to give up everything, take this farm and start planting grass for cattle. We came back to Paris and we returned to Brazil during Christmas. My father had rented a bulldozer to build a road that goes up the mountain. The farm is huge, and it was the rainy season. There was heavy rain and the rain carried away all the earth that the bulldozer had dug up. It killed our stream, a beautiful stream in which I'd swum with caimans when I was a child. We lived in this stream, and we killed the stream. Lélia said to me, 'You're not a farmer. I'm not a farmer. We're going to take this land and plant the forest that was here before.' And little by little, we started to rehabilitate a forest. We were not activists in any movement. But today, we are ecologists.
Sebastião Salgado, Shaman ngelo Barcelos (Koparihewë, which means 'Head of Song' or 'Voice of Nature'), from the community of Maturacá, interacts with Xapiri spirits in visions during an ascent to Pico da Neblina, the highest mountain in Brazil. For the Yanomami, it is a sacred place called Yaripo. Yanomami Indigenous Territory, State of Amazonas, 2014
How did immersing yourself and reconnecting with nature through growing a forest lead you to rediscover your passion for photography and inspire your project, 'Genesis', thereby making the transition from people to nature as your central interest?
It gave meaning to 'Genesis'. I had given up photography. While we were in Brazil, I simply did a photography project because I'm a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, and UNICEF asked me to make a book about the end of polio. Although I was no longer a photographer, I went to a lot of countries around the world for this project with UNICEF. We published a book in New York. Seeing this forest come to life in Brazil is wonderful because a tree, even a small tree, gives leaves, flowers and fruit, and then the insects come, so do the birds, then the mammals. We saw life and the birth of a forest. That gave me the crazy desire to go and photograph there, but no longer our species, to go and photograph all the other species. That's when, with Lélia, we conceived a series of trips over eight years, to go around the world to photograph the pristine part of the planet, the part that hasn't been destroyed. And that's how 'Genesis' was born. We have destroyed a good part of our biodiversity, but we still have 47 % of the planet – almost half of the planet – that's still here. It's not the easiest part to destroy because these are the deserts, the very cold part of the planet, the very high lands, the very humid lands. They are intact. Over eight years, I made 32 trips to 32 countries or regions of the world, from the Arctic to Antarctica, but the greatest journeys I've ever gone on are within myself, to discover that I am one single species among thousands of other species, and each one is as important as ours. I was in total despair when I finished the Rwanda project. When I stopped, my hope was dead. And after, my hope was reborn, no longer based on the human species, but based on all the other species on the planet. If we disappear, and we will disappear, because we are programmed to end, the planet will completely reconstitute itself. I believe in evolution, that it's the history of this planet. The planet is fantastic.