Latest news with #SebastiãoSalgado
New European
a day 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.'
New York Times
a day ago
- General
- New York Times
The Amazon Loses One of Its Most Celebrated Chroniclers
Last week we learned that the world lost more forest cover than in any other year on record, or the equivalent of 18 soccer fields of forested land every minute, according to researchers. The world also lost Sebastião Salgado, a legendary photographer, champion of the environment and chronicler of his native Brazil's forests, who died last week at 81. (You can see a collection of his photos here.) Drawing on nearly 50 visits to the Amazon rainforest, in 2021 Salgado published Amazônia, a book of characteristically dramatic black-and-white photographs of the region's awe-inspiring vastness, its threatened Indigenous people and the sheer force of nature to create weather and carve landscapes.
Yahoo
2 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
3 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.
Forbes
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Legendary Brazilian Photographer Sebastião Salgado Has Died At 81
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.
