Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Salgado dead at 81

By Manuela Andreoni

Sebastiao Salgado, the Brazilian photographer whose black-and-white images of workers, migrants, and humanity's conflicted relationship with nature captivated the world, has died of leukemia at the age of 81, his family said on Friday.

Salgado was born in 1944 in Aimores, a small town in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. An economist by training, he became a photographer in the 1970s while living in Paris, after fleeing with his wife, Lelia Wanick Salgado, from the military regime that then ruled Brazil.

He traveled the world with his camera and quickly rose through the ranks of photo agencies, eventually becoming one of Magnum's star photographers.

A 1987 photo essay of thousands of half-naked men digging through the immense mine of Serra Pelada, in northern Brazil, formed part of his landmark Workers series, in which he also documented oil workers in Kuwait and coal miners in India.

The project brought together his training as an economist and his eye as a photographer, said Neil Burgess, who was his agent for 40 years.

"It was madly ambitious, and I struggled to think how to even begin pitching the idea to editors in London," Burgess wrote in a 2019 essay in the British Journal of Photography. And, yet, after seeing his work portraying gold miners, several of the world's top magazines wanted to fund it, he added.

Salgado went on to publish a number of ambitious and epic projects. In Exodus, from the 2000s, he spent years photographing the grueling journeys of migrants around the world. In Genesis, in the 2010s, he captured monumental scenes of nature, animals, and Indigenous people.

And in Amazonia, his most recent project, he spent years traveling through the world's largest rainforest to capture some of the planet's most remote treasures and the communities that protect them.

Beto Marubo, an Indigenous advocate from the Vale do Javari territory who spent months with Salgado as he photographed a tribe in voluntary isolation there, said that he was impacted by the thoughtfulness of his work.

"He wanted to show the world the importance of the Amazon as it is," Marubo said.

'AESTHETE OF MISERY'

Salgado's critics accused him of exploiting an "aesthetic of misery" as he photographed some of the world's poorest in their most vulnerable moments.

"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," he told The Guardian in a 2024 interview.

To Burgess, he did quite the opposite, by capturing the dignity of his subjects at their moment of need.

"This might well be enhanced by his use of black-and-white as a medium, but it's more to do with two other qualities that Salgado has in large measure: patience and curiosity," he wrote.

In 1998, Salgado and his wife founded a nonprofit, Instituto Terra, to restore the native Atlantic Forest, one of Brazil's most threatened, on their old family farm. They have since planted 3 million trees there.

Salgado died in Paris, where he lived with his wife, of complications from malaria he caught in Indonesia in 2010 while taking photos for his Genesis project, his family said in a statement. He suffered from several bouts of the illness over the years, which recently triggered a severe form of leukemia.

"Through the lens of his camera, Sebastiao fought tirelessly for a fairer, more humane, and more ecological world," his family said of him.

On Friday, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva gifted a Salgado photo to Angolan President Joao Lourenco, in Brasilia for a state visit, featuring a statue evoking popular revolts in Portugal and Angola. The timing was a coincidence, Lula said.

"His discontent with the fact that the world is so unequal, and his unwavering talent in portraying the reality of the oppressed, has always served as a wake-up call to the conscience of all humanity," Lula said in a statement. "For this very reason, his work will continue to be a cry for solidarity. And a reminder that we are all equal in our diversity."