Sebastião Salgado
Photo: Sebastian Salgado

We have lost a special, refined and educated gaze that for 50 years glimpsed the world. Documentary photographer Sebastião Salgado, from Aimorés, Minas Gerais, (23-1944), passed away on Friday the 2025rd in Paris.

Sebastião followed and portrayed the passage of human beings across the planet. In his black and white photos, the depth of a gaze that attempted to translate humanity with generosity and criticism. Accurate. With a background in economics, it was with this bias and a solid cultural foundation that he documented the 20th and 21st centuries.

When Sebastião Salgado decided to become a photographer in 1973, the world was very different. Analog. The Cold War was still in the news, the Berlin Wall was still standing, and Brazil was immersed in the worst period of the military dictatorship. It was in this scenario that Sebastião, who already had a background as an economist, with a master's degree in São Paulo and the United States and, for political reasons, had moved to Paris in the late 1960s, turned to photography, completely abandoning numbers and economic spreadsheets and turning to cameras and lenses. He worked for the International Coffee Organization and was sent to Angola to coordinate a project on coffee culture in that country. In addition to a pencil and calculator, he took his camera – which, in fact, belonged to his wife Lélia – and several films. It was there that Sebastião Salgado the photographer was born.

From his first images and due to his worldview forged in economics and humanism, he chose as the theme of his work to record the lives of people who lived on the margins of society. His photos brought us the victims of famine in Africa, the gold miners in Serra Pelada, the peasants and indigenous peoples of the Americas, the war maimed in Cambodia, the victims of wars, the landless in Brazil and the places in the world still preserved from the destruction of human beings. 

Although he was also heavily criticized for the aesthetic choice of his subject matter, we also noticed his generosity and dignity with which he looked at his subjects. If he photographed sadness, he also presented hope.

If a photograph doesn't change the world, it can serve as a trigger for reflection and a good debate. As researcher and historian Susie Linfield states, “a photograph is not there to say 'look what's happening', but to warn us: 'this can't happen'”.  Perhaps that is why Sebastião Salgado's images have created so much controversy. 

He, heir to traditional documentary photography, born at the beginning of the 20th century, as a street photograph, of the everyday of presenting a social complaint or,  still quoting Susie Linfield, “after photography, no one can claim ignorance anymore”, she brought her well-defined vision to our attention. Her photographs presented in exhibitions around the world remain alive in her books, prepared and edited in partnership with her wife Lélia Wanick Salgado, and why not, co-author of her works. She herself, a Brazilian graphic producer, author and environmentalist, graduated in architecture from the University of Paris VIII, was responsible for lending her camera to Sebastião in the 1970s, and for designing and editing his photographs and exhibitions, throughout these more than 50 years of profession: Outras Américas, Trabalhadores, Terra, Êxodos, Gênesis, Amazonia, Gold (Serra Pelada). This is her legacy, which we hope will live on.

With the death of Sebastião Salgado, we lost everyone, including his detractors. 


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