Sebastião Salgado, who died last week, of leukemia, at the age of eighty-one, was among the most famous documentary photographers of the twentieth century. Throughout more than four decades of epic, globe-spanning projects, many of which were both self-assigned and largely self-funded, he forged an instantly recognizable aesthetic in a field that tends to shy away from overt authorial touch. His pictures were sweepingly cinematic, symbolically loaded, and unabashedly gorgeous, even when he was photographing some of the greatest human horrors of the past century, such as the famine in the Sahel region of Africa in the mid-nineteen-eighties, or the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide. A latter-day cornerstone of what Cornell Capa once dubbed “concerned photography,” Salgado’s work earned him numerous prestigious prizes and was showcased in grand touring exhibitions and in hefty coffee-table books. Sandra Phillips, the former senior curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, once called him “one of the most important artists in the Western Hemisphere.”

Salgado’s pictures were also freighted with their fair share of controversy. Susan Sontag, in her final book, “Regarding the Pain of Others,” called him “a photographer who specializes in world misery,” whose work “has been the principal target of the new campaign against the inauthenticity of the beautiful.” The critic and editor Ingrid Sischy wrote in a scathing 1991 piece for The New Yorker that Salgado’s work was “oversimplified,” “heavy-handed,” and ultimately ineffectual. “To aestheticize tragedy,” she said, “is the fastest way to anesthetize the feelings of those who are witnessing it. Beauty is a call to admiration, not to action.” How you feel about Salgado’s work might depend on whether you agree with that statement. If you believe that difficult truths should be delivered only in their rawest, plainest form (which is, of course, simply another form of artifice), then Salgado’s stunning images are not for you. But, if you believe, as I do, that most viewers are savvy enough to separate content from form, then Salgado’s operatic style can be seen as a potent enhancement of his act of bearing witness.

Salgado was born in the Brazilian municipality of Aimorés, in the state of Minas Gerais, in 1944. He grew up on a cattle ranch alongside seven sisters, and as a young man he became an avowed Marxist. After a military coup in 1964, he and his wife, Lélia, fled to Paris, where he completed coursework for a Ph.D. in economics from the Sorbonne, before taking a job in London at the International Coffee Organization. He stumbled into photography after borrowing a camera Lélia had purchased to aid in her studies to become an architect, and became so quickly enamored that, soon enough, he built a darkroom in their apartment. After some debate, he turned down a job offer with the World Bank and resolved to become a photographer.

Within a few years of working as a peripatetic photojournalist, during which he covered a handful of minor conflicts and standard-issue fare such as golf tournaments, Salgado secured a spot with the legendary photo agency Magnum, in 1979. (He later broke with Magnum to found his own agency with Lélia, Amazonas Images, which exclusively represented his work.) In 1981, on assignment covering the early days of the first Reagan Administration, he took a career-making series of pictures of the aftermath of John Hinckley, Jr.,’s assassination attempt, which were picked up by newspapers across the globe—and the financial windfall from these shots allowed him to purchase the Paris apartment that he lived in with his wife until his death. But Salgado undertook his most ambitious projects independently.

“Workers: An Archaeology of the Industrial Age,” the first of three mammoth series completed over nearly three decades, was an attempt to commemorate manual labor at a time of rapid mechanization. The pictures, which were taken in twenty-six countries, cover an exotic range of human endeavors, including the production of perfume in Réunion, the quelling of the Kuwaiti oil fires, and, most famously, the toils of gold miners in Serra Pelada, Brazil. Overwhelmingly, the pictures portrayed manual work as a noble, even romantic enterprise. In one, we see a Galician fisherman perched at the head of a small, crowded boat, staring into the middle distance with a gravity befitting Odysseus. In another, we see a Bangladeshi ship-breaker dwarfed by the sublimely towering husk of a boat docked on a beach, suggesting an industrial-era update of Caspar David Friedrich’s “The Monk by the Sea.”

Sischy, in her critique of Salgado, wrote that his approach to industrial labor shared none of the activist bite of Lewis Hine’s turn-of-the-century pictures of child laborers, which famously played a role in cementing anti-child-labor legislation. Salgado’s “basically uncritical” pictures, Sischy asserted, “would look at home in corporate annual reports.” Like Hine in the latter part of his career, which was largely defined by his heroic, semi-staged photographs of workers, Salgado was principally concerned with portraying the fundamental humanity of his subjects, asserting the value of their work rather than portraying them simply as victims of rapacious exploitation. In this way, they were perhaps closer to Soviet-style socialist realism than they were to boosterish corporate pablum.

Last year, on the occasion of Taschen’s reissue of “Workers” (originally published in 1993), I had the chance to interview Salgado over video chat. He was in Paris, sitting in his studio, with a mural-size print of one of his photographs behind him. Salgado had a smooth shaved head and wild white eyebrows. In conversation, he was charming and genial, but he is well practiced in sparring with his critics. “People criticize me that what I do is the beauty of the misery,” Salgado told me. “But I never, I never, photograph the misery. Never. I photograph people that were less rich in material goods. Misery, what is the misery?” His follow-up to “Workers” was a project called “Exodus,” which documented the world’s deracinated people—migrants, exiles, refugees. He spoke to me of the importance of community. “When I photograph the refugees that come out of Malawi, going inside Mozambique—if one of them dies, the others will cry for him. You see they have not a bank account, they have no shoes. But they were proud. They were happy. They have a family that they live inside. And they deserve to have a nice picture. Why not?”

After spending time in Rwandan refugee camps, Salgado told me, he suffered from a series of physical and mental maladies. He saw a doctor back in Paris who told him that, though there was nothing physically wrong, if he kept pursuing his work he would surely die. “I was so upset to be a human being,” he said, “because I saw the amount of violence that we are capable of. We are a terrible species. I gave up photography. I said, ‘Never more in my life I do pictures.’ ” Salgado put his camera away and moved with his wife back to Brazil, to the family cattle ranch, which he had inherited from his father. When they arrived, they found the land nearly denuded of life. Lélia suggested that they might try to rewild it, partly as a form of therapy and partly out of ecological concern. Decades later, what is now called the Instituto Terra is a lush Eden, replete with wildlife and more than two and a half million trees, and serves as a kind of laboratory, providing inspiration for similar projects around the world. “This forest coming back gave me a huge wish to photograph again,” Salgado told me. “And in this moment I said, ‘I go to see my planet.’ I wanted to see what is pristine in this world.”

The resulting eight-year project, “Genesis,” was a paean to natural landscapes and Indigenous ways of living, from Antarctica to the Amazon rain forest. The project is tinged with a tentative note of optimism—look how much of our Earth remains unspoiled—but it also represents a sort of pulling away from humanity. “Before then, I had only faith in humanity,” he told me. “I started to discover that the planet was not composed only of human beings.” Salgado, who is survived by Lélia, their two sons, and two grandchildren, was eighty years old at the time of our conversation. Although he was still occasionally making pictures—he had been trying his hand at drone photography—his days of crafting large-scale projects were over. The waning of Salgado’s career seemed to mark the end of an era of ambitious, essayistic photojournalism, which has been under pressure for more than a decade owing to dwindling print-publication budgets and increased reliance on iPhone-toting “citizen journalists.” Salgado reflected on the privilege of seeing the world as thoroughly as he had. “To see what I see, to have contact where I have—I lived really deep inside the human communities, and I lived deep inside the environment. If it was necessary to start again, I would start exactly as I did before. I had a big pleasure in my life.”

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/sebastiao-salgados-view-of-humanity

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If a picture is worth a thousand words, his spoke novels. He was Steinbeck, Tolstoy, and Tolkien… all in one. His images capture the spirit of the poor and working classes.

And they grip the viewer. Refusing to let your eyes peal from the picture before you. Pictures in black and white. Pictures that seem to have been painted by brush strokes, but which are as real as the camera equipment he used.

Sebastião Salgado was an artist, and he was a documentarian, capturing the plight of the downtrodden, but also their soul. Their beauty.

He was criticized for this. They said he glorified poverty. He responded that the poor deserve just as good a picture as the rich. Probably even better.

Sebastião Salgado was born February 8, 1944, in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. He trained as a Marxist economist. Joined the movement against Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1960s, and went into exile in France in August 1969 with his wife.

“I arrived in France with Lélia, my wife, at the end of the 1960s as an exiled person, fleeing the system of deep repression that existed at the time in Brazil,” he posted on Instagram almost two years ago. “Soon afterwards, the Brazilian military dictatorship withdrew our passports and we had to file an injunction to get them back. We became refugees here in France, and then immigrants. When I did a piece of work on refugees and immigrants, I already knew this story, in my own way I had lived it. For years, I had been looking for people who had been displaced from their place of origin and were in transit, looking for another point of stability. They left either for economic reasons, climate change or because of conflict. I realised a body of work called “Exodus”. In reality, I was photographing a part of my own life, portrayed in other people, some of them in slightly better situations than I had, and the vast majority in much worse conditions. It was a very important moment in my life, of identifying with these people, and of feeling deeply what I was photographing,” he wrote.

He first began taking pictures in the early 1970s with his wife’s Leica. By 1973, he had quit his job at the International Coffee Organization and became a freelance photographer. He traveled the world. Worked for several photography agencies. 

He was covering the first 100 days of Ronald Reagan in 1981, when he was one of the only photographers to capture the assassination attempt on Reagan’s life.

Salgado sold the pictures to finance his first major photography trip to Africa. 

Salgado’s projects would span the world. He would travel to 120 different countries on his photography trips. His pictures are big. Larger than life. Epic. Like the landscape photographer Ansel Adams’, but with grit. Portraying humanity…

The best and the worst.

And at their heart, revealing truth, struggle, the fight to survive, to exist. And the underpinnings of an unjust, unequal global system where so many have so little and so few have so much.

Like his 1986 pictures of the Serra Pelada Gold Mine, in Brazil. They seem like something from a dystopian future, or a long-forgotten past. Thousands of workers in shorts and t-shirts climbing through the mud on rickety ladders in near-slave conditions.

“He always had the idea that things are always going to get better, that we are on the path for development and somehow if he could create a warning, he could contribute to this process of social progress in society,” his son, filmmaker Juliano Salgado would later say.

Salgado shot masterpiece collections of pictures of workers. Of the fight for land and land reform. Of nature. The Amazon. Climate change. And when he visited communities, land occupations, or groups like Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement, he didn’t just drop in, shoot and leave, like news agencies photographers then and now. He stayed for days. He documented it. He experienced it. He lived it.

Sebastião Salgado’s photography spoke volumes, portraying deep and profound truth, shining light on the problems and the injustices of the world in exquisite images that one simply cannot ignore. 

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Sebastiao Salgado passed away on May 23, 2025, at the age of 81.

His legacy lives on. 

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Hi folks, thanks for listening. I’m your host Michael Fox. 

I have been a huge fan of Sebastiao Salgado for years. I’m happy I was able to do this short story on his tremendous life and work.

This is Stories of Resistance, a podcast series co-produced by The Real News and Global Exchange. Each week, I bring you stories of resistance and hope like this. Inspiration for dark times. If you like what you hear, please subscribe, like, share, comment or leave a review.

As always, you can find follow my reporting and support my work and this podcast at Patreon.com/mfox.

Thanks for listening. See you next time.

This is episode 43 of Stories of Resistance—a podcast co-produced by The Real News and Global Exchange. Independent investigative journalism, supported by Global Exchange’s Human Rights in Action program. Each week, we’ll bring you stories of resistance like this. Inspiration for dark times.

If you like what you hear, please subscribe, like, share, comment, or leave a review. 

And please consider signing up for the Stories of Resistance podcast feed, either in Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Spreaker, or wherever you listen.

Visit patreon.com/mfox for exclusive pictures, to follow Michael Fox’s reporting and to support his work. 

Written and produced by Michael Fox.

Here is Sebastião Salgado’s Instagram page: https://www.instagram.com/sebastiaosalgadooficial

Here is a beautiful written piece about Sebastião Salgado’s work on workers: https://www.holdenluntz.com/magazine/new-arrival/sebastiao-salgados-workers-an-archeology-of-the-industrial-age/

https://therealnews.com/sebastiao-salgado-capturing-humanity-in-pictures