Sebastiao Salgado, acclaimed Brazilian photographer, dies at 81

Straits Times

26-05-2025

Brazilian photojournalist Sebastiao Salgado among his works on show at the exhibition, Amazonia: Photographs By Sebastiao Salgado at the National Museum of Singapore, in November 2024. PHOTO: ST FILE
Rio de Janeiro - Sebastiao Salgado, a celebrated Brazilian photographer whose striking images of humanity and nature in the Amazon rainforest and beyond won him some of the world's top honours and made him a household name, died on May 23 in Paris. He was 81.
His death was announced by Instituto Terra, the environmental nonprofit that he and his wife founded in Brazil.
His family cited leukemia as the cause, saying that Salgado had developed the illness after contracting a particular type of malaria in 2010 while working on a photography project in Indonesia.
'Through the lens of his camera, Sebastiao tirelessly fought for a more just, humane and ecological world,' Salgado's family said in a statement. 'Rich in humanistic content, this work offers a sensitive perspective on the most disadvantaged populations and addresses the environmental issues threatening our planet.'
Working mostly in black and white, Salgado garnered widespread acclaim at home and abroad with his striking images of the natural world and the human condition, often travelling around the globe to photograph impoverished and vulnerable communities. In all, he worked in more than 120 countries throughout his career.
Salgado was especially interested in the plight of workers and migrants, and spent decades documenting nature and people in the Amazon rainforest.
He captured some of his most well-known images in 1986, when he photographed workers toiling in a gold mine in the northern Brazilian state of Para. The photo essay cemented Salgado's reputation as one of the star photographers of his time.
In the 1980s, Salgado also moved audiences worldwide with a series of pictures depicting the famine in Ethiopia. That work earned him worldwide recognition and won some of photography's most prestigious awards.
In 1991, while on assignment in Kuwait, Salgado photographed workers struggling to extinguish oil-well fires set by Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's troops, an environmental disaster that came to define Iraq's turbulent retreat from Kuwait.
'The photos were beyond extraordinary,' said Ms Kathy Ryan, a former photo director at The New York Times Magazine, who worked with Salgado on that assignment. 'It was one of the best photo essays ever made.'
His Kuwait photos were featured on the cover of the magazine.
On another noteworthy assignment, Salgado documented dramatic scenes following a failed assassination attempt on then United States President Ronald 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,' Ms Ryan said. But, she added, he also had an uncanny sense of 'where important stories were'.
Known for his intense blue-eyed gaze and his rapid way of speaking, Salgado was remembered by his colleagues as a defender of documenting the human condition who respected the people he photographed.
He was at times criticised for cloaking human suffering and environmental catastrophe in a visually stunning aesthetic, but Salgado maintained that his way of capturing people was not exploitative.
'Why should the poor world be uglier than the rich world?' he asked in an interview with British newspaper The Guardian in 2024. 'The light here is the same as there. The dignity here is the same as there.'
Over the course of his career, Salgado's work won some of photography's top prizes, including two Leica Oskar Barnack Awards and several World Press Photo awards. He was named an honorary member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1992 and the French Academy of Fine Arts in 2016.
Sebastiao Ribeiro Salgado Jr was born on Feb 8, 1944, in Aimores, in the countryside of the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. The only son of a cattle-ranching family, he had seven sisters.
While studying at university in the 1960s, he met his future wife Lelia Deluiz Wanick. When a military dictatorship came into power in Brazil a few years later, the couple moved to France.
His wife survives him, as do two sons, Juliano and Rodrigo, and two grandchildren.
An economist by training, Salgado discovered photography while working for the World Bank and travelling to Africa.
He began his career as a freelance photographer in 1973 and quickly rose through the ranks to become one of the most renowned photographers at the Magnum collective. In 1994, Salgado left Magnum to form his own agency together with his wife and longtime collaborator.
He later spent years travelling across the Amazon. He captured arresting images of vast rivers and rainforests while also documenting the impact of human beings on natural landscapes and the Indigenous people fighting to preserve them.
In the late 1990s, Salgado and his wife founded Instituto Terra in the region where he was born, with the aim of restoring the Atlantic Forest, which had been ravaged by human encroachment.
Salgado's 'vision and humanity', American photographer and photojournalist Steve McCurry posted on Instagram, 'left an indelible mark on the world of photography'. NYTIMES
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