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Ian Youngs
Culture reporter
Getty imagesSebastião Salgado, considered one of the world’s largest documentary photographers, died at the age of 81.
The photographer born in Brazil was known for its dramatic and infallible black and white images of hardships, conflicts and natural beauty, recorded in 130 countries for 55 years.
His hard photos described great global events such as the Rwanda genocide in 1994, burning oil fields at the end of the Gulf War in 1991 and the famine in the Sahel region of Africa in 1984.
“His lens revealed the world and his contradictions; his life, the power of transforming action,” said a statement from Instituto Terra, the environmental organization he founded with his wife, Lélia Wanick Salgado.
Getty imagesSome of his most striking photos were taken in his home country, including epic photos of thousands of desperate figures who work in open-cast gold mines and striking images of the native population of the Amazon.
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva paid tribute and described Salgado as “one of the best … photographers the world gave us”.
The last major project of Salgado, Amazônia, highlights the beauty and vulnerability of the rainforest.
Philip Reynaers/Photonews/Getty imagesA lifelong advocate for the indigenous people of the Amazon, Salgado documented the daily life of a dozen of the tribes spread over the rainforest – from hunting and fish expeditions to dancing and rituals.
He spent seven years on an ambitious photographic journey, exploring the external series of the Amazon Registration forest and documenting the inhabitants.
The Culmin project in an exhibition with more than 200 black and white images and offers a moving view of the landscapes and communities of the region.
The Amazônia exhibition was shown in the Science Museum in London and the The Science and Industry Museum in Manchester in 2021 and 2022.
Benjamin Cremel/AFP via Getty images“Sometimes I ask myself,” Sebastião, were you really after all these places? “” he said to an interviewer last year.
“Was it really traveling to 130 different countries for years, which went deep into the woods, to oil fields and mines?
“Boy, it is really the one who did this. I am probably one of the photographers who made the most work in the history of photography.”
Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP via Getty Images)Salgado was born in 1944 and left a career in the economy to start as a photographer in 1973.
He worked on international assignments for various photography agencies before forming his own Amazonas images, with Lélia in 1994.
He received the excellent contribution from the Sony World Photography Awards to photography in 2024.
Other awards were the Prince of Asturias Award and recognition as a Unicef Goodwill ambassador.
Alessandro di Marco/EPAFEThrough the Instituto Terra, Salgado and Lélia also restored his father’s farm in Brazil in the flowering rainforest by planting more than three million trees.
The statement from the institute added: “Sebastião was much more than one of the greatest photographers of our time.
“In addition to his life partner, Lélia Deliz Wanick Salgado, he sowed hope where there was destruction and brought the conviction to life that the recovery of the environment is also a profound love for humanity.”
