- Documenting the eye of humanity and the soul of the earth
Sebastião Salgado, the Brazilian photographer whose camera lens etched the plight, dignity, and resilience of humanity into the visual memory of our times, died on May 23 2025, at the age of 81. With his passing, the world has lost not just a documentarian of social struggle but a relentless seeker of humanity’s deeper truths. Salgado’s five-decade photographic journey, marked by immense scale and unwavering ethical focus, profoundly transformed the canon of documentary photography.
His images, unflinching, empathetic, and immaculately composed in monochrome, charted the lived experiences of workers, migrants, indigenous peoples, and environmental ruin. But, perhaps more importantly, they challenged viewers not just to see suffering, but to feel the urgency of global injustices and ecological degradation.
Born in Aimorés, in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, on 8 February 1944, Salgado was not trained as a photographer but as an economist. He earned degrees in economics from the University of São Paulo and pursued doctoral research in Paris. His early professional life took him to the International Coffee Organisation in London, where, during a research trip to Africa, he picked up a camera, a moment he would later describe as “a revelation”.
Abandoning his well-paying career in economics, he returned to Paris and committed fully to photography in the early 1970s. “Photography was my language,” Salgado later recalled. “It allowed me to express what I couldn’t in numbers or words.” Thus began a lifelong quest to bear witness, not from a distance, but from within the stories he told.
A visual language of dignity
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Salgado’s early works, including his seminal photobook ’Other Americas’ (1985), reconnected him with Latin America’s marginalised populations. His lens focused not on the spectacle of suffering, but the intricate, dignified rhythms of rural and indigenous lives. Shot across the continent, these images were intimate without being intrusive, stark yet never cold. They captured both the hardships and continuities of culture, spirituality, and familial life. It was a quiet rebellion against photographic exoticism and poverty porn.
His belief in the power of black-and-white film was central to his ethos. “Colour distracts,” he once remarked. “Black and white speaks directly to the soul.” The monochrome palette stripped away superfluity, focusing the viewer on textures, emotions, and relationships between people, and between people and the earth.
Workers and the mythology of labour
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In 1993, Salgado released ‘Workers’, arguably his most iconic project. Seven years in the making, and spanning 120 countries, the book was a monumental homage to manual labour, from the sweltering gold mines of Brazil’s Serra Pelada to ship-breaking yards in Bangladesh and oil fields in Kuwait.
The photograph of barefoot men climbing out of the Serra Pelada mine, burdened by sacks of ore, became emblematic of the project. To Salgado, this scene evoked the building of the Egyptian pyramids, a living archaeology of human toil. The workers are not victims, but titans; their strength and exhaustion preserved in timeless chiaroscuro.
This was not just photography. It was Salgado’s reckoning with modernity and inequality. He captured, without romanticising, a disappearing world of physical labour in the face of mechanisation and exploitation. And in doing so, he gave it permanence.
From Exodus to Genesis: A philosophical turn
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If ‘Workers’ was a portrait of economic struggle, ‘Exodus’ (2000) dealt with mass displacement. From Rwandan genocide survivors to Afghan refugees and Latin American migrants, Salgado catalogued human movement across 35 countries. While visually powerful, ‘Exodus’ drew criticism for what some perceived as aestheticising suffering. Critics accused him of turning misery into museum art.
Salgado fiercely rejected the charge: “Why should the poor world be uglier than the rich world?” he asked. “The light here is the same. The dignity is the same.”
But these critiques stirred something within him. Perhaps haunted by the scale of despair he had documented, Salgado turned his gaze elsewhere, to life that remained unbroken. In ‘Genesis’ (2013), he photographed untouched landscapes and traditional societies from the Arctic to the Amazon. It was an eight-year-long spiritual pilgrimage to what he called “the origins of the world”.
This shift marked a profound philosophical turn. While not abandoning his social commitments, Salgado began to explore harmony rather than rupture, not as escapism, but as renewal. ‘Genesis’ was not a retreat from the real world, but a reminder of its endangered beauty and balance.
Reforesting the soul: The birth of Instituto Terra
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The personal became political, and environmental. Having grown up on land degraded by cattle ranching, Salgado and his wife, Lélia Wanick Salgado, launched Instituto Terra in 1998. Their mission: to restore 17,000 acres of devastated Atlantic rainforest in Minas Gerais.
Through meticulous replanting, the project revived biodiversity, reintroduced over 300 plant species, and created a thriving educational centre for ecological conservation. What was once barren is now bursting with life. Here, too, Salgado’s vision extended beyond imagery, into action, advocacy, and legacy.
“I photographed so many people who lost everything,” he once said. “Now I wanted to be part of the restoration.”
Collaboration, recognition, and legacy
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Lélia, his lifelong partner, architect, and creative collaborator, designed his books and exhibitions, co-creating the visual language that gave Salgado’s work its poetic coherence. Their son, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, co-directed ‘The Salt of the Earth’ (2014) with Wim Wenders; a documentary that brought his life story to a broader audience and was nominated for an Academy Award.
Salgado received numerous accolades, including the Royal Photographic Society’s Centenary Medal, membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the role of UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador. Yet, despite such acclaim, he remained unpretentious. His kitchen in Paris was equipped with knives once used to butcher cattle on his family farm.
Sebastião Salgado leaves behind a corpus that defies categorisation, at once humanist, political, environmental, and spiritual. He reframed what social documentary photography could be: not just visual journalism, but a moral invocation. His work resists being merely ‘beautiful’ or ‘shocking’; it is always in dialogue with the viewer, asking us to reckon with the world, and our place in it.
He did not exploit suffering, he dignified it. He did not aestheticise misery,he elevated the everyday into the epic. He reminded us, in frame after frame, of our shared vulnerability and our interconnected futures.
A world through his eyes
In his final years, even as he battled leukaemia, a complication of the malaria he contracted in 2010, Salgado continued to dream in images. His 2021 project, ‘Amazônia’, was both a lament and a celebration: a visual symphony of rainforest and resistance. His subjects were not ‘others’ but kin, protectors of a living, breathing planet.
Sebastião Ribeiro Salgado Júnior did not just take photographs. He constructed a world of empathy, activism, and awe. He showed us that the camera can be an instrument of justice, and that to see deeply is to care profoundly.
He is survived by his wife Lélia, sons Juliano and Rodrigo, and grandchildren Flavio and Nara. But in truth, he is survived by all of us, those he inspired, those he depicted, and those who now carry his gaze forward.
“Photography is a language that speaks across borders,” Salgado once said. “It can touch the soul.”
His images will continue to do just that, long after the shutter has closed.
(The writer is a researcher at Law & Society Trust, an independent journalist, and a social documentary photographer based in Colombo)
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The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of this publication