Renowned Documentary Photographer Sebastião Salgado Dies

Men with 30kg bags on their backs. One behind another like an army of ants. They climb up a ladder slick with mud and sweat. To lose one’s footing, to loosen one’s grip would lead to a domino’s effect where man will fall on man culminating in a heap of broken flesh and bone. In one image you see no faces, just the straining muscles of arms and legs, as they clench at the ladder. The absence of faces renders the men almost insect-like, as they go about digging, burrowing and lifting the earth. In another image a man’s face can be seen in profile. His stoop is reminiscent of Jesus bearing the cross. His expression and posture tell of extreme concentration and fatigue. He must focus on every step he takes. At the corner of the frame a hand reaches out to the man. Given the intensity of his gaze he perhaps cannot even see the outstretched palm.

These are two images taken by Sebastião Salgado of workers in a gold mine in the northern Brazilian state of Pará in 1986. He documented the toil of these miners who would spend their days going up and down rickety and endless ladders with loads strapped to their body. One cannot see these images and not be moved. In black and white, and offset by light, both images reflect the exploitation of man and land. The land is gouged of minerals, and it is the poorest of men who must accomplish the most impossible of tasks in the hardest of conditions.

Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado, who is best known for his dramatic black-and-white photographs, rich in silhouettes and shadows, that highlighted both injustice, and the wonders of the natural world, died at 81 on May 23 in Paris. He spent years exploring the Amazon rainforest and was one of the first photographers to immortalise its majesty for outsiders. Over his career, he won some of photography’s top prizes, including two Leica Oskar Barnack Awards and several World Press Photo awards. Through his career he focused on the plight of workers and migrants, the pillage and restoration of the earth.

Trained as an economist, he started taking photos in the 1970s and soon rose to fame and was a member of the world’s premier photography collectives. He travelled to over 130 countries in over five decades. Even a quick glimpse of his work will illustrate its depth and scope. In a photo shot at Churchgate Station, Mumbai, in 1995, he captures the movement of hundreds of people on the platforms as they walk between parked trains. To see this image is to reckon with the density of India’s population and the daily migration of people. From the hubbub of Mumbai, his photos take one to the empty snowscapes of the South Sandwich Islands where Chinstrap penguins dive into the icy waters. With his respectful yet searing gaze he captured the famine of Ethiopia in the 1980s through the people huddled around tents and cooking pots after days of walking. In the early 1990s he photographed the workers struggling to dowse the flaming oilwells of a besieged Kuwait.

Covering the Rwandan genocide nearly broke him, and he even contemplated leaving photography. But his life took a different turn and he returned home to Brazil in the mid-1990s. In 1998, Salgado and his wife Lélia Wanick Salgado established Instituto Terra in Brazil, a large-scale project to restore the Atlantic Forest. It was conceived as a project “to see the whole planet, to see what was pristine and hadn’t been destroyed,” (he said in an interview last year to Geographical). Along with his wife he helped restore over 2,000 hectares. In the 25 years since it began, Instituto Terra planted more than 1.1 million trees and rehabilitated around 2,000 water sources and regreened hundreds of acres.

His last major project (2021-) was devoted to the Amazon forests and included more than 200 images which are still touring the world. Here he immortalised the lushness of the forests, the sweep of the rivers and the lives of the indigenous people. Through his work he drew attention to the ravages of climate change and anthropomorphic activity.

Salgado’s photographs always echoed his concerns for the earth and the often-hidden cost of economic development. He always brought his respect for the earth to his subjects, ensuring that even while documenting hardships and atrocities, the people in his images were always figures of dignity and grace.Sebastião Salgado

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