Award-winning photographer Sebastiao Salgado dies at 81

West Australian

24-05-2025

Brazilian photographer and environmentalist Sebastião Salgado, known for his award-winning images of nature and humanity, has died at 81, his family says.
Salgado died in Paris, where he lived for more than 55 years, local media reported.
Salgado's style was marked by black-and-white imagery, rich tonality, and emotionally charged scenarios. Many of his best pictures were taken in impoverished communities, especially in the Amazon and in Africa.
"Through the lens of his camera, Sebastião tirelessly fought for a more just, humane, and ecological world," Salgado's family said in a statement.
"As a photographer who travelled the globe continuously, he contracted a particular form of malaria in 2010 in Indonesia while working on his Genesis project. Fifteen years later, complications from this illness developed into severe leukaemia, which ultimately took his life," the family added.
Earlier, Instituto Terra, which was founded by Salgado and his wife Lélia Wanick Salgado, and the French Academy of Fine Arts, of which he was a member, announced his death.
"Sebastião was more than one of the best photographers of our time," Instituto Terra said in a statement. "His lens revealed the world and its contradictions; his life, (brought) the power of transformative action."
Composer Laurent Petitgirard, secretary of the French Academy of Fine Arts, said in a statement that Salgado, one of his colleagues, was "remarkable for his moral integrity, his charisma, and his commitment to serving art."
"He leaves behind a monumental body of work," Petitgirard said about a photographer who received many awards, and was elected an honorary member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences in the United States in 1992 and to the French Academy of Fine Arts in 2016.
Salgado's main works include the recent Amazonia series, Workers, which shows manual labour around the world, and Exodus (also known as Migrations or Sahel), which documents people in transit, including refugees and slum residents.
Salgado had his life and work portrayed in the documentary The Salt of the Earth (2014), co-directed by Wim Wenders and his son, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado. The film was was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary in 2015.
One of Brazil's most famous artists, though, always insisted he was "just a photographer."
Salgado moved to France in 1969 as Brazil endured a military dictatorship. He said in different interviews he was then a leftist militant against the regime.
It was in Paris in 1973 that he started to fully dedicate his time to photography and develop his black-and-white style, years after his economics degree.
His first professional works were for the agency Sygma in 1974. The following year, he documented the lives of peasants and Indigenous peoples in Latin America for the Gamma agency. Five years later, he joined Magnum, a top brand for photographers, of which he later became president.
Salgado left it in 1994 to found Amazonia Images with his wife, an agency that exclusively handles his work.
Brazil's President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who received Salgado's support throughout his political career, requested a minute of silence during a ceremony in the capital Brasilia to honour "one of the greatest, if not the greatest, photographer the world has ever produced."