Born in Aimorés, Brazil, Sebastião Salgado trained as an economist before becoming a photographer in the early 1970s. He earned an MA in economics from São Paulo University in 1968 and a PhD in economics from the University of Paris in 1971. His work at the International Coffee Organization in London required him to make frequent trips to Africa, and his desire to document these experiences sparked his interest in photography; by 1974 he was freelancing as a photojournalist for the Sygma agency in Paris. He then worked for Gamma from 1975 until 1979, when he joined Magnum, the international photography cooperative founded in 1947 by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, George Rodger and Chim (David Seymour). Salgado has produced a number of extended documentary series throughout his career, several of which have been published. These include Sahel: L’homme en détresse (1986), Other Americas (1986), An Uncertain Grace (1990), and Workers (1993), a worldwide investigation of the increasing obsolescence of manual labor. Salgado has won many honors for his work, among them the Eugene Smith Award for Humanitarian Photography, two ICP Infinity Awards for Journalism, the Erna and Victor Hasselblad Award, and the Arles International Festival’s prize for best photography book of the year for Workers.
Sebastião Salgado’s straightforward photographs portray individuals living in desperate economic circumstances. Because he insists on presenting his pictures in series, rather than individually, and because each work’s point of view refuses to separate subject from context, Salgado achieves a difficult task. His photographs impart the dignity and integrity of his subjects without forcing their heroism or implicitly soliciting pity, as many other photographs from the Third World do. Salgado’s photography communicates a subtle understanding of social and economic situations that is seldom available in other photographers’ representations of similar themes.
Source: International Center of Photography
Sebastião Salgado, born on February 8, 1944, in Aimorés, Brazil, is the photojournalist whose dramatic black-and-white works powerfully express the beauty and destruction of the planet, the diversity of humanity, and the suffering of the impoverished.
Early life and career
Salgado was the only son of a cattle rancher who wanted him to become a lawyer. Instead, he studied economics at São Paulo University, earning a master’s degree in 1968. While working as an economist for the Ministry of Finance (1968–69), he joined the popular movement against Brazil’s military government. Seen as a political radical, Salgado was exiled in August 1969. He and his wife fled to France, where he continued his studies at the University of Paris. In 1971, while on an assignment in Rwanda as an economist for the International Coffee Organization, he took his first photographs and soon decided to teach himself the craft. He became a freelance photojournalist in 1973.
Gaining prominence
Over the next decade Salgado photographed a wide variety of subjects, including the famine in Niger and the civil war in Mozambique. In 1979 he joined the prestigious Magnum Photos cooperative for photojournalists, and two years later he gained prominence in the United States with a riveting photograph that captured John Hinckley’s attempt to assassinate President Ronald Reagan.
Mature work
By the mid-1980s Salgado had begun to devote himself almost entirely to long-term projects that told a story through a series of images. By this time he also established his style: impassioned photographs grounded in great formal beauty and strong compositions, which lend a sense of nobility to his often downtrodden subjects. He won the City of Paris/Kodak Award for his first photographic book, Other Americas (1986), which recorded the everyday lives of Latin American peasants. This was followed by Sahel: Man in Distress (1986), a book on the 1984–85 famine in the Sahel region of Africa, and An Uncertain Grace (1990), which included a remarkable group of photographs of mud-covered workers at the Serra Pelada gold mine in Brazil.
In 1993 Salgado’s international reputation was confirmed when his retrospective exhibition “In Human Effort” was shown at the Tokyo National Museum of Modern Art; it was the first time in the history of Japan’s national museums that the works of an individual photographer were displayed. That same year he published Workers, an epic portrait of the working class. Four years later Terra: Struggle of the Landless received tremendous critical acclaim. The collection of black-and-white photographs taken between 1980 and 1996 documents the plight of impoverished workers in Brazil; the work includes a preface by Portuguese novelist José Saramago as well as poems by Brazilian singer-songwriter Chico Buarque.
Later career
In the 1990s Salgado recorded the displacement of people in more than 35 countries, and his photographs from this period were collected in Migrations: Humanity in Transition (2000). Many of his African photographs were gathered in Africa (2007). Genesis (2013) assembled the results of an eight-year global survey of wildlife, landscape, and human cultures uncorrupted by the onslaught of modernity and industrialization. Other publications included Kuwait: A Desert on Fire (2016), Gold (2019), and Amazônia (2021).
In 1998 Salgado and his wife, Lélia Wanick Salgado, helped to found the Instituto Terra, a project that endeavored to restore a degraded portion of rainforest in Minas Gerais, Brazil. He was the subject of Wim Wenders’s documentary The Salt of the Earth (2015). In 2021 Salgado was awarded the prestigious Praemium Imperiale by the Japan Art Association.
Source: Britannica
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