The Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado, who has died aged 81, produced striking works of immense scale and scope that recorded globally significant issues for more than half a century. Variously described as working in a humanitarian or documentary tradition, he adapted both to his own genre.
Subjects such as child labour and indigenous religious cultures were recontextualised in the multiple themes of more than 30 books and as many large-scale exhibitions in his lifetime. Using black-and-white film, which he believed avoided the “distractions” of colour, he awarded his subjects both significance and dignity.
A single project would be pursued across countries and continents, often over a period of seven or more years.
His first book, Other Americas (1985), arose from his desire to return from years living abroad to re-view the continent of his origin.
Images are drawn from across the southern American continent, from the massive disruptions of land- and cityscapes to close-up, unsentimental portraits of local people and internal migrants; depictions of working lives that continue through childhood to old age.
Sparse images are captioned simply with a date and country of origin in a pared-down depiction of the continent’s people and their otherwise unrecorded lives. Against the wealth of contrasting customs, the impression persists that people are everywhere different and everywhere the same.
This work set the benchmark for subsequent projects, focusing on the particular, while addressing major, often recurrent, issues of the latter half of the 20th century. Poverty and deprivation may be integral to the lives of street sellers and street children, along with those of factory and rural workers. Yet each series goes beyond the documentation of misery, leaving scope to explore what persists, in Salgado’s fascination with cultural and indigenous practices and the continuities of family life.
In Workers (1993) he offered a frequently terrifying array of images drawn from across the world. The entire project, covering 120 countries, took seven years to complete. One image in particular, of gold miners dressed in rags and weighed down by sacks of ore, scrambling barefoot up the walls of Brazil’s Serra Pelada mines, has become perhaps Salgado’s most famous photograph.
When Salgado first saw the scene, “every hair on my body stood on edge. The Pyramids, the history of mankind unfolded. I had travelled to the dawn of time.”
As if in compensation, a follow-up, Genesis (2013), sought out the remaining pristine natural environments where people maintain traditional ways of life and ancestral religions. It took him eight years to document, following his journey from the Arctic to the tropics, from barren desert to vertiginous mountain ranges; the book weighs in at more than 4kg.
In works such as Exodus, a documentation of migration that began in 1993, Salgado was sometimes accused of “exploiting or aestheticising misery”, an accusation he strongly refuted. “Why should the poor world be uglier than the rich world?” he said in a Guardian interview last year. “The light here is the same as there. The dignity here is the same as there. The flaw my critics have, I don’t. It’s the feeling of guilt … I came from the third world … The pictures I took, I took from my side, from my world, from where I come.”
Born in the town of Aimorés in the state of Minas Gerais, Salgado was the son of a local landowner and cattle-rancher whose cows grazed the land barren, something that disturbed Salgado even as a child. Many decades later, it provided the impetus for his creation of the Instituto Terra, restoring his father’s land to fertility and establishing a research programme around conserving wild flora and fauna.
He obtained BA and master’s degrees in economics at São Paulo University before deciding to escape the ruling military dictatorship and leave Brazil in 1969. Two years earlier he had married a fellow student, Lélia Wanick, and together they moved to France, where he wrote his doctoral thesis at Paris University and Lélia graduated in architecture from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. In 1971 they moved again to London, where Salgado worked as an economist for the International Coffee Organisation and began photo-documenting coffee production in Africa and Latin America.
This discovery of photography led him to abandon his high-paying job after two years, return to Paris and start out as a freelance photographer, joining the new photo agency Sygma. He moved on to Gamma in 1975, then in 1979 joined Magnum. He made some of his most famous images on assignment for the renowned reportage agency and photographic co-operative, including of the famine in Ethiopia in the 1980s, the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan in 1981 and the burning oil wells of Kuwait in 1991.
Following internal disagreements with Magnum, in 1994 Salgado and Lélia established their own exclusive agency named Amazonas Images. It was then that I first met them, while presenting a BBC television documentary on his life and work. We kept in touch thereafter, and I was invited to stay at the nascent Instituto Terra, driven around its borders by Salgado in a rattling 50s Jeep.
Other Americas became a multiple award-winning and republished photobook classic. Further key works appeared, including Sahel, the End of the Road (1988) and An Uncertain Grace (1990). His projects began to be collected under one-word titles: Workers, Terra (1997), and Africa (2007). Others – Genesis and Exodus – newly interpreted their legendary biblical associations. And Amazônia (2021) captured aspects of the region’s precious yet precarious landscape in stunning panoramas, as well as the unadorned expressiveness of its people.
From the outset, political activism and consciousness-raising had been integral to Salgado’s photography, as he worked not only to record but to address global living standards and freedoms, seeking to raise awareness and effect change. In this he collaborated closely with Lélia, who designed and co-curated his exhibitions.
Their teamwork expanded in the 90s in the plan to restore part of the Atlantic Forest in Minas Gerais. Instituto Terra, which promotes reforestation and environmental education, was set up in 1998. Once desertified land is now worked by farmers and foresters, and the institute has become a major educational centre. In 2014 their eldest son, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, co-directed with Wim Wenders The Salt of the Earth, a biographical film of Salgado’s life.
Public recognition of Salgado’s photographic achievements and his philanthropy earned him the position of a Unicef goodwill ambassador, together with a litany of awards, including the Royal Photographic Society’s centenary medal and honorary fellowship, and membership of the Institut de France and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Yet he remained modestly traditional in his personal tastes: his Paris kitchen was equipped with cooking knives that once skinned the family’s cows.
Since 2010, when he contracted malaria, Salgado had been suffering from severe health issues that resulted in leukaemia.
He is survived by Lélia, their two sons, Juliano and Rodrigo, and two grandchildren, Flavio and Nara.