The Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado, who is best known for his dramatic black-and-white photographs that highlighted injustice and introduced the Amazon rainforest the world, has died. He was 81.
His death was confirmed by the Instituto Terra, the environmental restoration non-profit he founded with his wife of six decades, Lélia Wanick Salgado. In a post on Instagram, the institute described Salgado as “much more than one of the greatest photographers of our time”.
Salgado had developed severe leukaemia due to complications from malaria contracted in Indonesia in 2010, his family said in a statement.
“I know I won’t live much longer,” Salgado told the Guardian in an interview last year. “But I don’t want to live much longer. I’ve lived so much and seen so many things.”
Salgado was born in rural Minas Gerais, Brazil, and studied economics in São Paulo. His leftwing sympathies led him and Wanick to move to Paris during the political repression of Brazil’s 1964-1985 military dictatorship. It was there that he took up photography in the 1970s, experiencing an instant rise to stardom.
His prolific career took him to more than 130 countries over five decades, where he documented the world’s human injustices and natural environments through instantly recognisable black-and-white compositions shaped by expressive lighting. His beautiful shots of human suffering led some to criticise him for being an “aesthete of misery”.
“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,” Salgado said last year.
With his awe-inspiring landscapes, Salgado also drew attention to the destruction of the planet. One of his most famous photographs, taken in 1986, captured illegal gold miners toiling away in the anthill-like Serra Pelada mine in the Amazon.
In his last mega-project, Amazônia (2021) – a monumental exhibition of more than 200 photographs that is still touring the world, currently on display in Brussels – Salgado showcased the Amazon’s lush landscapes, sinuous rivers and diverse Indigenous peoples, drawing attention to the wealth of the rainforest as it faces heightened threat of destruction from human activities and the climate crisis.
The award-winning photographer also put his environmental concerns into practice, working to restore the native Atlantic forest on the family farm in Minas Gerais. The Instituto Terra has reforested over 2,000 hectares of land and produced nearly 7m seedlings since it was founded in 1998. “We will keep honouring his legacy, cultivating the land, justice and beauty he so believed was possible to restore,” the institute said.
Although Salgado had taken a step back from photography, he continued to work on many projects, including a special show for the Cop30, which will be held in the city of Belém on the edge of the Amazon in November.
Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, observed a minute of silence when he learned of Salgado’s passing during an event in Brasília on Friday. The photographer’s work serves “a warning for the conscience of all of humanity”, Lula said in a statement. “Salgado didn’t only use his eyes and his camera to portray people: he also used the fullness of his soul and heart.”
The French Academy of Fine Arts, of which Salgado was a member, described him as a “great witness to the human condition and the state of the planet”.
Salgado was in the process of editing and curating his monumental body of work, an archive of more than 500,000 pictures, for sale when he died.
He is survived by his wife, Lélia, his two sons Juliano and Rodrigo, and his grandchildren Flávio and Nara.
