Sebastião Salgado

Sebastião Salgado (1944). One of the world’s most important photographers and of the main representatives of humanist photography, Sebastião Salgado focuses primarily on socially oriented documentary photography in his work. Salgado has dedicated his life to wandering, recording the Earth and the various facets of the human condition. For his usually long-term photographic projects, the Brazilian-born artist has travelled to more than one hundred and twenty countries around the world. His black-and-white photographs often capture the pristine faces of nature and humanity – remote landscapes, wildlife, and human communities that continue to live in harmony with the traditions and cultures of their ancestors. With a strong sense of social justice, he has also tried to capture the disappearing world of manual labour in the poorest parts of the world and thus the end of the industrial revolution, without depriving workers of their dignity. This theme is explored, for example, in a series entitled Gold (1986), depicting the hard-working men of the Serra Pelada gold mine in Brazil, which draws viewers into the human mummery of the gold rush and confronts them with the brutal reality of the exploitation of nature and the working class. With empathy, he also observed the starving in Africa or the fate of people living in slums on the outskirts of big cities. His photographic work is also closely linked to environmental activism, which Salgado has been involved in for a long time. (Since the 1990s, he has been involved in the restoration of the Amazon rainforest; he has already turned thousands of acres into nature reserves and founded the Instituto Terra, which is dedicated to reforestation, conservation, and environmental education.) Salgado is also a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador and was awarded honorary membership of the American Academy of Arts in 1992. From 1979 to 1994, he was a member of the Magnum Photos international photography agency, and after leaving the agency he founded his own agency, Amazonas Images, in Paris.