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Boston Globe
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Sebastião Salgado, photographer of human misery and dignity, dies at 81
A scene from the 2014 French/Brazilian documentary film "The Salt of the Earth," directed by Juliano Ribeiro Salgado and Wim Wenders. Courtesy of (c) Sebastiao Salgado In his landmark 1986 photo essay of gold mine workers in the Pará 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. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Goldmine, Serra Pelada, State of Pará, Brazil, 1986 © Sebastião Salgado © Sebastião Salgado, courtesy of Robert Klein Gallery Advertisement For decades, Mr. 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. The assignment in Kuwait was for The New York Times Magazine and centered on the efforts of workers struggling to extinguish oil-well fires set by Saddam Hussein's troops, an environmental disaster that came to define Iraq's turbulent retreat from Kuwait. 'The photos were beyond extraordinary,' said Kathy Ryan, a former photo director at magazine, who worked with Mr. Salgado on that assignment. 'It was one of the best photo essays ever made.' Advertisement On another noteworthy assignment, Mr. Salgado documented dramatic scenes following a failed assassination attempt on President Reagan in 1981. He photographed the gunman, John Hinckley Jr., moments after he was tackled to the ground. 'Everyone knows he had an incredible way of making pictures,' Ryan said. But, she added, he also had an uncanny sense of 'where important stories were.' 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 are food and safety. 'I admit there's a very specific message in my work,' Mr. Salgado 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.' '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.' A scene from "The Salt of the Earth," directed by Juliano Ribeiro Salgado and Wim Wenders. Photo courtesy of (c) Sebastiao Salgado An economist by training, he borrowed his wife's camera in 1971 while working in London for the International Coffee Organization. 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,' Mr. Salgado 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 professional home for some of the world's top photographers. Advertisement Mr. Salgado stepped away from Magnum in 1994 to establish Amazonia Images with his wife, Lélia 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. Mr. Salgado increasingly turned his lens on nature - drawing close enough to photograph the armor-like skin on a marine iguana in the Galapagos and, other times, pulled back for vistas such as a river through the Alaskan wilderness and the sculpted curves of Antarctic icebergs. An iceberg between Paulet and South Shetland islands off Antarctica, shown in a scene from "The Salt of the Earth." Courtesy of (c) Sebastiao Salgado In his 'Amazonia' series, Mr. Salgado traveled across the rainforest, taking portraits of Indigenous people and chronicling the power of the natural world such as towering clouds, appearing in his photos the color of forged steel, 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. 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,' Mr. 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,' he added. 'We think we can control nature, but it's easy to forget that we need it for our survival.' Manda Yawanawá, from the village of Escondido. Rio Gregório Indigenous Territory, State of Acre, Brazil, 2016 © Sebastião Salgado © Sebastião Salgado, courtesy of Robert Klein Gallery Sebastião Ribeiro Salgado Jr. was born in Aimorés, in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais north of Rio de Janeiro, on Feb. 8, 1944. His family operated a cattle ranch. Advertisement In 1964, the Brazilian military seized control of the government in a coup that ousted President João Goulart. As the ruling junta waged crackdowns on dissent, Mr. 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.' Among his honors was the Leica Oskar Barnack Awards, 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, he leaves his sons, Juliano and Rodrigo, and two grandchildren. A 2014 documentary on Mr. Salgado's life and work, 'The Salt of the Earth,' was co-directed by Wim Wenders and his son Juliano. Mr. Salgado, an honorary degree recipient, took a picture during a Harvard Commencement ceremony in Cambridge in 2022. Mary Schwalm/Associated Press In a memorial ceremony in Brazil's capital, Brasília, the country's president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, led a minute of silence and called Mr. Salgado's photographs 'a wake-up call for the conscience of all humanity.' During an interview with the Guardian last year, Mr. 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.' Mount Roraima, State of Roraima, Brazil, 2018 © Sebastião Salgado © Sebastião Salgado, courtesy of Robert Klein Gallery Material from The New York Times was used in this obituary.
Mail & Guardian
7 days ago
- Lifestyle
- Mail & Guardian
There are new killers on the loose
Purple haze: Jacaranda in bloom are beauties, but condemn the aliens. There it was in stark black and white, the sad news that legendary Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado had died at the age of 81 in Paris. It is terrible news but the great man lived a full life travelling to the remotest corners of the world to document the lives of people, the environment and the relationship between the two. Sometimes brutal but always beautiful, his images of human suffering led some to call him the 'aesthete of misery'. Probably his most well-known image is the one of hundreds of workers at the Serra Pelada gold mine in Brazil swarming up crude wooden ladders weighed down by heavy containers. But there are thousands of other equally unforgettable images — always black and white and often with the contrasts of light accentuated — from Salgado's trips to the wildest areas on Earth, from the Amazon to the Arctic. In the documentary The Salt of the Earth, co-produced by German director Wim Wenders and Salgado's son Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, the acclaimed photographer, a man after my own heart, says: 'We humans are terrible animals.' Something that I didn't know about Salgado is that after experiencing the horrors of the Rwandan genocide, in 1998 he put aside his cameras and founded the Instituto Terra. In a grand reforesting project he planted hundreds of thousands of trees in the Rio Doce valley in Brazil. Amid the relentless barrage of stories about the forests being chopped down, or cleared to make room for planting, or just burnt in raging fires caused by climate change, these projects offer a glimmer of hope. And the sheer numbers of the trees planted are truly awe-inspiring. India has an impressive number of inspiring characters who are leading the way in reforestation projects. Jaggi Vasudev, more commonly referred to as Sadhguru, founder of the Isha Foundation, says his ambition is to plant 2.4 billion trees. And with his gleaming white turban and flowing white beard the yogi, mystic, teacher and author has the gravitas to convince even the doubters that this ambitious plan is completely achievable. Here in Johannesburg we are constantly told we live in 'the biggest man-made forest in the world' with more than 10 million trees growing in the city. But Johannesburg is in danger of losing its place as the leading tree destination in the world, because our trees are not immune to the city's dangerously high crime rate. As yet the trees don't have a category in the crime stats, but if the rate of attrition continues to climb, the police commissioner will be reeling off some depressing figures of deaths, damage and murders. The biggest culprit is the aptly named shot hole borer, also known as PSHB (the P stands for polyphagous, which means the beetle can feed on multiple types of trees). Here is an expert definition of this criminal's modus operandi: 'The beetle infests trees by tunnelling deep into the trunk or branches and depositing a fungus that effectively poisons — and eventually kills — the tree. If the tree is a PSHB 'reproductive host' species, then the borer will reproduce in the tree at an alarming rate: a reproductive host tree can house up to 100 000 borer beetles. The offspring then fly out of the host tree and infest more trees.' Evidence of this habitual criminal's killing spree can be seen all over Johannesburg. Bare, blackened tree skeletons with rotting branches. Unfortunately the lethal little bug is not the only criminal attacking our trees. Humans won't let a two-millimetre sized insect from Vietnam outdo them when it comes to murdering trees. I have seen jacaranda trees viciously attacked by chainsaw-wielding suburbanites because they are unhappy with the 'mess' from the leaves and the beautiful mauve blossoms when they fall. I have seen a majestic plane tree in Bez Valley ruthlessly sawn down at ground level because a homeowner had opened a hair salon in his garage and didn't want the tree to impede the entrance. I have seen massive oak trees subjected to hideously slow deaths by criminals who set fire to piles of the trees' own leaves at the base of the trunk. These are trees that are on the pavement and supposedly belong to the city, but much like the smash-and-grabbers at traffic lights or armed hijackers who drive off with your car, not many of the tree killers are brought to justice. The problem here might be that all of the trees mentioned are what is politely termed 'exotics' brought in from Europe and South America to line the streets of the first suburbs of the rapidly expanding city. Some, like the jacaranda, adapted so well to their new home and reproduced so abundantly that they have been declared 'alien invasive plants guzzling up all the town's water and are harmful to the environment and surrounding species'. Sounds familiar doesn't it? Even by today's standards the tree situation cannot be called a genocide but Sebastião Salgado would surely have found inspiration here for his searing photographs.
The Guardian
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Sebastião Salgado captured the world like no other photographer
It's a testament to the epic career of Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado, who died this week at age 81, that this year has already seen exhibitions of hundreds of his photos in Mexico City, France and southern California. Salgado, who in his lifetime produced more than 500,000 images while meticulously documenting every continent on earth and many of the major geopolitical events since the second world war, will be remembered as one of the world's most prodigious and relentlessly empathetic chroniclers of the human condition. An economist by training, Salgado only began photographing at age 29 after picking up the camera of his wife, Lélia. He began working as a photojournalist in the 1970s, quickly building an impressive reputation that led him to the prestigious Magnum Photos in 1979. He spent three decades photographing people in modern societies all over the world before stepping back in 2004 to initiate the seven-year Genesis project – there, he dedicated himself to untouched landscapes and pre-modern human communities, a project that would guide the remainder of his career. His late project Amazônia saw him spend nine years preparing a profound look into the terrain and people of the Amazon rain forest. In 2014 the German director Wim Wenders teamed up with the photographer's son Juliano Ribeiro Salgado to co-produce a documentary celebrating Salgado's work titled The Salt of the Earth. While covering 40 years of Salgado's creative output, the film also centers around his decision to temporarily abandon photography after witnessing firsthand the horrors of the Rwandan genocide. Amid that crisis he founded his Instituto Terra in 1998 – ultimately planting hundreds of thousands of trees in an effort to help reforest Brazil's Rio Doce valley – and through his communion with the land slowly pieced his way back to photography. Salgado tirelessly, and probably also recklessly, threw himself into his work – while documenting Mozambique's civil war in 1974 he ran afoul of a landmine, and later, in Indonesia in the 1990s, he caught malaria, leading to ongoing medical issues for the remainder of his life. He spent nearly two months walking Arctic Russia with the Indigenous Nenets, encountering temperatures as cold as -45C, and he also recounted walking nearly 1,000km through Ethiopia because of the lack of roads. Late in life, Salgado was forced to have a surgical implant in order to retain use of his knee in the course of making his Amazônia project. His biblical landscapes are often taken from thousands of feet in the air – one imagines him leaning out of a helicopter, angling for the perfect framing. He was known for utilizing virtually every mode of conveyance available in pursuit of the new and unseen – car, truck, ship, helicopter, plane, even canoe, hot-air balloon, Amazon riverboat and others. Prints of Salgado's work – always black and white, and generally printed at a dazzlingly high contrast – were as sizable as his ambitious, landing as overwhelming presences in galleries and museums. He was known for blacks that were as inky as they come, and his landscapes also show a remarkable obsession with rays of light shining through rainclouds, around mountains and off of water. He loved the graininess that came from film – so much so, that when he finally traded in his trusty Leica for a digital camera, he often digitally manipulated his images to bring in a grain reminiscent of real film. For as much as Salgado was a photographer of extremes, he could also do tonal nuance – many of his landscapes are only capable of capturing their terrain's immensity due to his careful use of mid-tones, and Salgado's human portraiture often abandoned the high contrast for a rich subtlety. No matter how enormous his subjects were, he always retained a remarkable human touch. When photographing Brazil's Serra Pelada gold mine he made images showing the workers as thousands of ants scrambling up perilously sheer walls of dirt, yet also captured indelible expressions of effort and pride on the faces of individual, mud-soaked laborers. His image of the Churchgate train station in Bombay, India, shows thousands of commuters in motion, looking like a literal flood of humanity surging around two waiting trains. One snap of a firefighter in Kuwait working to cap the oil wells that Saddam Hussein set ablaze shows a man hunched over in a posture of utter exhaustion, one of countless examples of Salgado's incredible ability to limn the human form via film. Given everything that Salgado shot over his incredible six decades of work, it's hard to imagine what else he could have done. Upon turning 80 last year, he had declared his decision to step back from photography in order to manage his enormous archive of images and administer worldwide exhibitions of his work. He also showed his dim outlook for humanity, telling the Guardian: 'I am pessimistic about humankind, but optimistic about the planet. The planet will recover. It is becoming increasingly easier for the planet to eliminate us.' It will probably take decades to fully appreciate and exhibit Salgado's remaining photographs, to say nothing of grappling with the images he showed during his lifetime. One hopes that amid a period of increasing global strife, environmental collapse and threats to the mere notion of truth, this remarkable output will remain a beacon of decency and humanity – and help us chart a path back from the brink.
South China Morning Post
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
Sebastiao Salgado, award-winning Brazilian photographer, dies at age 81
Brazilian photographer and environmentalist Sebastiao Salgado, known for his award-winning images of nature and humanity, has died at age 81. Instituto Terra, which was founded by him and his wife, confirmed the information Friday, but did not provide more details on the circumstances or where he died. The French Academy of Fine Arts, of which Salgado was a member, also confirmed his death. The photographer had suffered from various health problems for many years after contracting malaria in the 1990s. 'Sebastiao 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.' 'We will continue to honour his legacy, cultivating the land, the justice and the beauty that he so deeply believed could be restored,' it added. One of Brazil's most famous artists, though he always insisted he was a photographer first, Salgado had his life and work portrayed in the documentary film The Salt of the Earth (2014), co-directed by Wim Wenders and his son, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado.
Associated Press
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Associated Press
Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Salgado dies at age 81, his institute says
SAO PAULO (AP) — Brazilian photographer and environmentalist Sebastião Salgado, known for his award-winning images of nature and humanity, has died at age 81. Instituto Terra, which was founded by him and his wife, confirmed the information Friday, but did not provide more details on the circumstances of Salgado's death or where it took place. 'Sebastião was more than one of the best photographers of our time,' Instituto Terra said in a statement. 'His lense revealed the world and its contradictions; his life, (brought) the power of transformative action.' Salgado's life and work were portrayed in the documentary film 'The Salt of the Earth' (2014), co-directed by Wim Wenders and his son, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado.
