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India Today
15 hours ago
- Entertainment
- India Today
Sebastião Salgado: The Moses of black and white
Back in the era of analog photography, when Sebastio Salgado's images first became iconic, these were like commandments etched in silver halide for photographers. They welled inside us a luminous awe, and we felt our cameras to be instruments of a divine purpose: to record the epic human battle of survival and to tinge it with prophet of this faith is now no more with us—in the passing of Sebastio Salgado, 81, the world has lost one of its most profound visual storytellers. His monumental black-and-white images elevated documentary photography to the realm of high art. The unflinching empathy with the human condition—visible in the chiaroscuro of his images —transcended reportage and transformed them into meditations on the human camera did not merely document the world, but moulded it anew in frames of compassion. He photographed human dignity and grace, gilding it with a beatific light, and rendered suffering in tones of sublime beauty, labour as a form of sacrament, and showed devastation imbued with promise of redemption. advertisement Born in Aimors, Brazil, Salgado educated himself in economics before discovering his true calling behind the camera. This profoundly shaped his approach to photography, infusing it with an understanding of the economic and political forces that shape human existence. His lens became a portal between the academic and the visceral, between an understanding of oppression and feeling its was, undeniably, a biblical cadence to his imagery—his moral vision saw humanity cast out of a utopian Eden, wandering through vast inhospitable deserts of deprivation, yet with traces of its divine spark still glowing amidst the his iconic series 'Workers', labourers emerged from the shadows like figures of a Caravaggio painting, their dignity illuminated against an exploitative industrial darkness. His documentation of famine in the Sahel and conflicts across Africa had images of human suffering panning out as visions of fate and biblical influence in Salgado's work extended beyond the merely aesthetic. His photographs of human exodus—whether of mud-slicked Brazilian gold miners descending into the earth like Dante's souls entering the Underworld or refugees crossing ravaged landscapes in search of promised lands—echoed the great migration narratives of searing images of oil-field workers subduing the infernos of burning oil wells during the gulf war showed us human resilience against apocalyptic tableaus. Yet these were not myths from a distant era; they were urgent contemporary crises, demanding response and action from powerful and sublime images, ironizing the harrowing conditions of suffering and survival with an aesthetic of grace and dignity struck at the core of our shared humanity. The photographs gained widespread acclaim, gracing magazine spreads and gallery walls. Yet this very success sparked the most intense criticism of his photography, in its dramatic use of light and subtle tonal gradations, is so painterly that many people have accused him of aestheticising agony and using the pain of human suffering as a paintbrush to create visual poetry. In the photographic community, this discourse is often referred to as 'the Salgado Paradox'. It voices concerns about empathy morphing into a 'beautification' of the image—one that transforms starving bodies into sculptural forms and human grief into visual grandeur. Critics such Susan Sontag argued that such beautiful depictions of misery could provide visual solace and aesthetic comfort rather than necessary discomfort to the conscience. They felt Salgado's painterly images could inadvertently numb viewers rather than impel them to respond to the battled these reactions, acknowledging the ethical concerns his work raised, at the same time defending his belief that beauty could serve as a conduit to empathy rather an escape from responsibility. His most eloquent response came not in words but in action—Instituto Terra, the environmental restoration project he founded with his wife Llia Wanick they resurrected 1,754 acres of devastated Brazilian Atlantic Forest, nurturing over two million saplings into a restored ecosystem. This remarkable reforestation effort stands as perhaps Salgado's greatest masterpiece—not captured in film, but in soil cultivated leaf by leaf, with an intent to offer healing to the fractured world that he ecological awakening birthed Salgado's final magnum opus: 'Genesis'. Across eight years and 32 expeditions to Earth's farthest of and most-pristine corners, he redirected his vision from humanity's wounds to the planet's remaining documented untouched landscapes bathed in glorious light and indigenous communities tenuously clinging to a harmony with nature, revealing Edens still existing on Earth—fragile yet magnificent, demanding protection rather than exploitation. He called it 'a visual ode to the majesty and fragility of Earth also a warning, I hope, of all that we risk losing'.advertisement As we bid farewell to Salgado, we celebrate a life dedicated to bearing witness to the struggles of humanity, through images of profound and lasting beauty—photographs that have the contemplative power of prayer and the silence of sacred spaces. He showed us how the camera could depict suffering without making us wince, creating visuals that lodge into memory like scripture, providing both comfort and a time when attention spans splinter into seconds and the digital deceptions of AI-generated imagery threaten the very foundation of photographic truth, we find ourselves navigating a crisis of visual faith. It is precisely now that we need the anchoring power of authentic photography—images that arrest, challenge and haunt us, as antidotes to the artificial allure of manufactured resurrection of Salgado's images, shared across digital platforms after his departure, once again reminds us of photography's fundamental promise: to reveal truth, to inspire compassion and to preserve the irreplaceable testimony of the human experience. It tells us all over again that the photograph made with a kindred eye is still the finest medium to transmit the magic and wonder of is Salgado's final and enduring to India Today Magazine
Observer
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Observer
Sebastiao Salgado, photojournalism elevated to art
Brazilian photojournalist Sebastiao Salgado, who died Friday, spent five decades chronicling the best and worst of planet Earth, from far-flung natural wonders to horrifying human catastrophes. The self-taught photographer crisscrossed the globe throughout his life, from Rwanda to Guatemala, from Indonesia to Bangladesh, documenting famine, war, exodus, exploitation and other tragedies of the so-called Third World with the empathy of "someone who comes from the same part of the world," as he said. His elegant black-and-white universe also celebrated the planet's immense beauty, such as the "flying rivers" of the Amazon rainforest, and served as a warning of nature's fragility in the face of climate change. Sebastiao Salgado, photojournalism elevated to art Sebastiao Salgado, photojournalism elevated to art He leaves an iconic body of work, published in "Life," "Time" and other leading magazines, collected in a stunning series of books, and regularly exhibited in the museums of world capitals such as Paris, where he lived for much of his life. Salgado won a long list of prestigious prizes across his career, including the Prince of Asturias and Hasselblad awards, and was the protagonist of filmmaker Wim Wenders' Oscar-nominated documentary "The Salt of the Earth" (2014), about the photographer's sojourns in distant corners such as the Arctic Circle and Papua New Guinea. Sebastiao Salgado, photojournalism elevated to art Sebastiao Salgado, photojournalism elevated to art - From Africa to Reagan - Born on February 8, 1944 in the rural county of Aimores in southeastern Brazil, Salgado grew up with seven sisters on their father's cattle farm. He recalled it as a place where visiting friends and family meant traveling for days, which he said taught him the patience to wait for the magical "fraction of a second" of the perfect photograph. He earned a master's degree in economics from the University of Sao Paulo, where he was active in the left-wing student movements of the turbulent 1960s. In 1969, he and his wife, Lelia Wanick, fled to France to escape Brazil's military dictatorship. He went on to receive French citizenship. He picked up Wanick's camera by chance one day in 1970 and was instantly hooked. "I realized snapshots brought me more pleasure than economic reports," he said. His job with the International Coffee Organization took him frequently to Africa, where he started taking pictures on the side. He would go on to turn down a dream job at the World Bank in Washington to pursue photography full-time. Wanick, who staunchly backed his career, stayed home raising their two sons, Juliano Ribeiro and Rodrigo, who was born with Down syndrome. Sebastiao Salgado, photojournalism elevated to art Sebastiao Salgado, photojournalism elevated to art Salgado's photos of drought and famine in countries such as Niger and Ethiopia landed him a job at renowned photo agency Magnum in 1979. He was working there when he captured one of the biggest news stories of the time, the assassination attempt on US president Ronald Reagan in 1981. Salgado made front pages worldwide with his photos of the shooting -- 76 frames in 60 seconds. But his true rise to fame came with his first book, "Other Americas" (1984) -- a series of portraits taken throughout Latin America -- and his unforgettable photographs of misery and resistance among the hordes of mud-covered miners at Brazil's infamous Serra Pelada, the biggest open-air gold mine in the world. Critics accused him of "beautifying suffering," but Salgado never veered from his aesthetic or his work. Sebastiao Salgado, photojournalism elevated to art Sebastiao Salgado, photojournalism elevated to art - Lens on Bolsonaro - Painstaking and meticulous, he liked to take his time getting to know his subjects, his three Leica cameras hanging from his neck. Photography "is a way of life," he told AFP in 2022, on a trip to Sao Paulo to present his exhibition "Amazonia," the product of seven years shooting the world's biggest rainforest. "It's connected with my ideology... my human and political activity. It all goes together." A dedicated climate activist, he was a fierce critic of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2022) for the far-right leader's push to open the Amazon to agribusiness and mining. Salgado also founded an environmental organization called Instituto Terra to revive disappearing forests in his home state, Minas Gerais, a successful project joined by more than 3,000 landowners. —AFP
New European
3 days ago
- General
- New European
Sebastião Salgado, Brazil's poet of dignity and decay
The 81-year-old was an economist who became an extraordinary photographer, who then became a powerful force for environmental regeneration. Instituto Terra led the reforestation of 17,000 acres of land in Brazil, planting more than three million trees so far. 'We can rebuild the planet that we destroyed, and we must,' Salgado once said. It is work that will continue under his partner, Lélia Deluiz Wanick Salgado, and their two sons. 'He sowed hope where there was devastation.' That was part of the message from Instituto Terra, the Brazilian non-profit conservation charity, last week announcing the death of its co-founder, the great Sebastião Salgado. Shrouded against the morning wind, refugees wait in the Korem camp, Ethiopia, 1984 The Brooks Range, Alaska, June and July 2009 Chinstrap penguins in the South Sandwich Islands, 2009 Photos: Sebastião Salgado/nbpictures The programme was financed by Salgado's photography, his trademark black and white images that appear to be lit by God. They explore mankind's deep connection to places being ripped apart by the 'progress' of industry. Perhaps most famous are his almost biblical shots of scores of workers toiling like ants in the Serra Pelada goldmine. His speciality, he said, was 'the dignity of humanity'. Salgado was a 29-year-old working in the coffee industry when Lélia bought a camera in 1971. Within weeks, he had one of his own, then a darkroom, then work as a freelance news photographer. He progressed to become a staff photographer at the industry's most celebrated agencies – including Sygma and Magnum – before branching out with Lélia on large-scale documentary projects of their own. Subjects included disappearing wildlife, displaced people fleeing war and climate catastrophe, Kuwaiti oil fires, and tribes from the Amazon to the Arctic. Around 50,000 men work in the opencast Serra Pelada goldmine in the state of Pará in Brazil, 1986 Sebastião Salgado in 2023 Photos: Sebastião Salgado/nbpictures; Francesco Prandoni/Getty Salgado was proud of forging close relationships with the people he photographed, claiming that the success of the Serra Pelgada photos – which caused a sensation when published by the Sunday Times in the late 1980s – was because 'I know every one of those miners, I've lived among them. They are all my friends.' His quest for the real came at a cost; he died of leukaemia, his bone marrow function having been badly damaged by malaria contracted on a work trip to New Guinea in 2010. Yet his beautiful images of people in extremis saw Salgado called by some a hypocritical exploiter. A 1980s campaign for Silk Cut cigarettes, in which tribesmen from Papua New Guinea carried the famous purple silk, proved particularly controversial. It was a charge Salgado rejected, telling the Guardian last year: '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.'
Yahoo
4 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
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 Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Arabian Post
5 days ago
- General
- Arabian Post
Sebastião Salgado, Master of Monochrome, Dies at 81
Sebastião Salgado, the Brazilian photographer whose haunting black-and-white images chronicled the human condition and environmental fragility, died on 23 May 2025 in Paris at the age of 81. His death was attributed to leukaemia, a condition linked to malaria he contracted during a 2010 assignment in Indonesia. Born on 8 February 1944 in Aimorés, Minas Gerais, Salgado initially pursued a career in economics, earning a master's degree from the University of São Paulo. His trajectory shifted in the early 1970s when, while working for the International Coffee Organization, he began photographing coffee plantations in Africa. This experience ignited a passion for photography that led him to abandon economics and dedicate himself fully to documenting global social issues. Salgado's work is distinguished by its profound empathy and meticulous composition. Over five decades, he travelled to more than 130 countries, capturing images that highlighted the dignity and resilience of people facing adversity. His seminal projects include 'Workers' , a tribute to manual labourers worldwide; 'Exodus' , documenting mass migrations and displacements; and 'Genesis' , a visual homage to the planet's pristine landscapes and indigenous cultures. ADVERTISEMENT His commitment to long-term projects allowed him to delve deeply into his subjects, often spending years on a single series. This approach garnered both acclaim and criticism; while many praised the aesthetic and emotional power of his images, some argued that his portrayal of suffering risked romanticising hardship. Salgado defended his methodology, asserting that his intent was to bear witness and provoke reflection. In the 1990s, after witnessing the horrors of the Rwandan genocide, Salgado experienced a period of profound personal crisis. He withdrew from photography and returned to Brazil, where he and his wife, Lélia Wanick Salgado, embarked on an ambitious reforestation project on his family's degraded farmland. This endeavour led to the founding of Instituto Terra in 1998, a non-profit organisation dedicated to environmental restoration and education. Over the years, the institute has planted millions of trees, revitalising the Atlantic Forest and serving as a model for sustainable development. Salgado's contributions to photography and environmentalism earned him numerous accolades, including the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund Grant, the Royal Photographic Society's Centenary Medal, and the Praemium Imperiale. He was also a member of the French Academy of Fine Arts and an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2014, his life and work were chronicled in the documentary 'The Salt of the Earth,' co-directed by his son Juliano Ribeiro Salgado and filmmaker Wim Wenders. In his later years, Salgado turned his lens towards the natural world, producing images that celebrated the planet's biodiversity and underscored the urgency of conservation. His 'Amazônia' project, published in 2021, is a testament to this shift, featuring photographs of the Amazon rainforest and its indigenous inhabitants. This body of work reflects his belief that humanity's fate is inextricably linked to the health of the environment.
