5 days ago
Sebastião Salgado, photographer who cast an unflinching gaze on oppression and environmental destruction
Sebastião Salgado, who has died aged 81, was a documentary photographer who captured the world at its hardest and most desperate. His subjects, caught in signature high-contrast black and white film, ranged from the destruction of the Amazon and indigenous communities of his native Brazil to famine in Ethiopia, genocides in Rwanda and Congo and wars in the Balkans and Kuwait.
'We humans are terrible animals,' he said in 2014. 'In Europe, in Africa, in South America, everywhere. We are extremely violent. It's an endless story… a tale of madness.'
The beauty of his work often stood in contrast to the subject matter, something Salgado faced criticism for. 'They say I was an 'aesthete of misery' and tried to impose beauty on the poor world. But 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.'
In 1986 Salgado made his most famous work, visiting Serra Pelada in Brazil's eastern state of Pará, the largest open-pit mining site in the world. In one photograph, hundreds of miners, many dressed in rags, covered head to foot in dirt, navigate wafer-thin paths carved out along a sheer hand-dug excavation. In another, a topless miner climbs a precarious wooden ladder from the vast hole in the earth; Salgado's composition gives the figure a decidedly Christ-like appearance.
The Amazon was also long a source of fascination, Salgado spending six years travelling in the rainforest. Aerial images depicting rivers and tributaries carving through the trees to the horizon contrast with more intimate pictures of indigenous communities: a shaman from the Maturacá people waves his hands midway through a ceremony, for example, or two hunters show off the brown woolly monkeys they have slain with poison darts.
Sebastião Ribeiro Salgado Jr was born on February 8 1944 near Aimorés, in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, the only son of eight children. His parents owned a cattle ranch that lay eight hours by horse to the nearest village.
At his father's insistence Salgado studied economics at the Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo in the city of Vitória, graduating in 1964. It was there that he met Lélia Wanick, whom he married, and the couple moved to São Paulo, where Salgado took a masters at the university there. Then committed Marxists, the couple left for France in 1969 as Brazil's Right-wing dictatorship entered its darkest years.
Salgado gained a PhD from Ensae Paris while Lélia was training to become an architect. For her course she bought a Pentax camera, and Salgado's first noted photograph was of his wife, sitting on the window sill of their apartment. Salgado would continue to shoot into light, to gain the high-contrast quality that characterised his work, throughout his career.
In 1971 Salgado took a position with the International Coffee Organisation in London, which involved frequent trips to Africa. He started to take photographs along the way. 'I realised snapshots brought me more pleasure than economic reports,' he recalled, and he turned down a job at the World Bank to pursue his passion. He joined Sygma and the Paris-based Gamma photo agencies and then, in 1979, Magnum Photos. In 1994, he and Lélia established Amazonas Images, their own agency.
On 30 March 1981 Salgado was in Washington covering a routine speaking engagement by Ronald Reagan. As the president was leaving his hotel, a would-be assassin pulled out a gun and fired, leaving a presidential staffer, a secret service agent and a policeman injured.
Salgado captured the chaos, his photographs landing on front pages around the world. With the money, he was able to fund his first self-initiated project, spending 18 months documenting famine in the Sahel of Africa, producing two books in aid of Doctors Without Borders, Sahel: Man in Distress and Sahel: The End of the Road, the first of many.
Other Americas was published in 1986, a continent-wide portrait of poverty in Latin America, followed by Workers, a record of global manual labour between 1986 and 1992, picturing men digging canals in Rajasthan or tarred with oil at the Greater Burhan oil field in Kuwait.
Exodus (1994) was the result of six years documenting refugees globally. 'I saw deaths by thousands every day. I lost my faith in our species… I went to see a friend's doctor in Paris, and told him that I was completely sick. He made a long examination, and told me: 'Sebastião, you are not sick, your prostate is perfect. What happened is that you saw so many deaths that you are dying. You must stop.''
Crossing into Rwanda at the height of the country's genocide, he was surrounded by a group of seven or eight men with machetes. They wanted to kill Salgado, believing him to be French, in retaliation for France's backing of the Hutus. Salgado persuaded them he was Brazilian, producing his passport, and he only relaxed once one of the militia asked him about the footballer Pele.
'I'm not a hero,' he told the Telegraph. 'I know when I'm very afraid because I have no more saliva in my mouth. It's completely dry – I'm afraid. But I was there to do my pictures.'
In 2014 he was the subject of the Oscar-nominated film The Salt of the Earth, directed by Wim Wenders and Salgado's son, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, and he leaves an archive of more than 500,000 images.
His death from leukaemia was the result of contracting malaria while on a reporting trip to Indonesia in 2010 which impaired his bone-marrow function.
Sebastião Salgado is survived by his Lélia and their sons Juliano and Rodrigo.
Sebastião Salgado, born February 8 1944, died May 23 2025
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