He received 48 expeditions to Amazon. Credit: Focus Pix / Shutterstock.com
Sebastian Salgado, a Brazilian photographer who documented some of the biggest contemporary challenges, including environmental protection, migration and labor, died at the age of 81.
His death, which occurred on Friday, May 23rd in Paris, where he lived, was confirmed by the Terra Institute, an environmental foundation that he co-founded with his wife, Lelia Vanick Salgado. According to his family, the cause was leukemia, a long-term result of a malaria match he had signed decades ago.
According to a Brazilian newspaper, Salgado, who has elevated photojournalism into an art form and became a master of black and white photography, was scheduled to attend a series of stained glass windows designed by one of his sons this Saturday. Folha de S. Paulo.
Born in the small village of Comment in 1944, Salgado was trained as an economist, in a state of coffee and mining in Minas Gerais. It led him to concentrate on the injustice that hurts the modern world and focus his work on the lives of marginalized people.
His last major project was a photo exploration of the Amazon rainforest. We captured everything about its amazingness to warn the world of its extreme vulnerability. In many ways, it was a return to Japan after a well-known international career. Married deep reflection and aesthetic beauty, his exhibition traveled the globe. His wife, Lelia, was his closest collaborator. Exodus, Genesis and laborer.
Lelia made the final selection of images. This was a painstaking trip and distillation of documents for years, from which Salgado returned with thousands of photographs. He turned his lens to some of the world’s most overlooked communities. Rural workers, illegal gold miners seeking property, Africans wandering through dry lands in search of water and hope.
Over the decades, he led 48 expeditions to Amazon with each accompanied by a mountain guide. His team also included translators, anthropologists and Cook. Upon arriving at the village, he asked locals to join in everyday life (hunting, cooking) and posing before creating an improvised studio in the centre of fabric.
“The Brazilian indigenous people have never been so threatened, but they have not been so organized,” he said in 2022 during his launch. Amazon Exhibition in Sao Paulo. The collection, which sends results from seven years of flights and fieldwork in the rainforest, is on display at the Anthropology Museum in Mexico.
A slow but decisive turn to the photo
Salgado began taking photos while working as an economist using Leica during his business trips across Africa. Fascinated by the media, he quickly left the role of a secretary of an international coffee organization and became a freelance photographer. A turning point came in 1981 when he witnessed the attempted assassination of US President Ronald Reagan by a man obsessed with actress Jodie Foster. Salgado then covered Reagan’s first 100-day inauguration, and captured the moment in Washington. With revenue, he returned to Africa to launch his first independent photography project.
But his work has not escaped the controversy
Throughout his career, critics accused him of profiting from the image of people in dire circumstances. In many cases, there are limited ways to tell your story. Cultural critics, including philosopher Susan Sontag, accused him of practicing the form of cultural extractionism.
Salgado put aside such criticism. “They said I aesthetic misery. Garbage!” he declared in a 2019 interview. “I’m filming my world.” In that same conversation, he described his lifelong commitment to black and white photography as an effort to avoid distracting colour from the human subjects of his work.
He said his choice to portray world confiscation was autobiographical rather than ideological. “I’m a third world person. I know Africa like Africa.
However, Salgado was also the son of a Brazilian white middle-class cow rancher. That contrast was not lost to his most intense critics.
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