By Manuela Andreoni
SAO PAULO (Reuters) – 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 at the age of 81, the nonprofit he founded said on Friday.
Salgado was born in Aimores, a city in the state of Minas Gerais in Brazil in 1944. An economist by training, he became a photographer in the 1970s while living in Paris, after fleeing the military regime that then ruled Brazil with his wife, Lelia Wanick Salgado.
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.
“It was madly ambitious, and I struggled to think how to even begin pitching the idea to editors in London,” his agent Neil 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.
His 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.
On Friday, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva gifted a Salgado photo to Angolan President Joao Lourenco, in Brasilia for a state visit. It 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.”
(Reporting by Manuela Andreoni, Fernando Cardoso and Isabel Teles; Editing by Rosalba O’Brien)
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