Sebastião Salgado, the renowned Brazilian photographer and environmentalist, has died in Paris at the age of 81. His profound black-and-white images left an indelible mark on the world, capturing both the dignity and struggles of humanity and the incomparable grandeur of nature.
Born on February 8, 1944, in Aimorés, in Brazil’s Minas Gerais state, Salgado originally trained as an economist before turning to photography in the early 1970s. His work spanned more than 120 countries and documented pressing global issues such as poverty, unemployment, migration, and the rapid degradation of our environment. His photographs, always in black and white, possess a timeless, spiritual quality in which hardship and resilience are inseparable. He once remarked, “Reality is so rich, I want to capture it without altering it.” Among his most notable projects are:
- Workers (1993) – A tribute to manual laborers around the world.
- Exodus (2000) – A chronicle of migration and displaced peoples.
- Genesis (2013) – A breathtaking work capturing untouched landscapes, wildlife, and communities living in harmony with nature.
Beyond photography, Salgado was a committed environmentalist. Together with his wife, Lélia Wanick Salgado, he founded the Instituto Terra in 1998, focusing on reforestation and environmental education in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest. When Salgado returned to Brazil in the 1990s, he was shocked to see the lush forest of his youth reduced to barren land. The ecosystem’s destruction mirrored the suffering he had documented throughout his career. Rather than despair, Salgado and Lélia purchased part of his family’s former farmland and committed themselves to its restoration. Thus began the herculean task of reforesting 1,500 hectares of devastated land. Instituto Terra combined ecological science with grassroots mobilization, planting native species from the Atlantic Forest biome—more than 2.7 million trees over two decades. Their goal was not merely to rebuild a forest, but to revive a functioning ecosystem.
Long-dried springs began to flow again, and hundreds of animal species returned, including jaguars, toucans, and capuchin monkeys. The area has since become a legally protected private nature reserve, actively studied by scientists and students. Today, the project serves as a model for land restoration, sustainable development, and climate resilience—demonstrating how environmental catastrophe can be reversed through community-driven action and science-based strategy.
Salgado’s extraordinary legacy lives on not only in the photographs that reshaped our view of the world, but also in the forests he helped revive, the awareness he spread, and the moral urgency he infused into his art.