Sebastiao Salgado, a celebrated Brazilian photographer whose striking images of humanity and nature in the Amazon rainforest and beyond won him some of the world’s top honours and made him a household name, died Friday in Paris.He was 81.His death was announced by Instituto Terra, the environmental nonprofit that he and his wife founded in Brazil.His family cited leukemia as the cause, saying that Salgado had developed the illness after contracting a particular type of malaria in 2010 while working on a photography project in Indonesia.“Through the lens of his camera, Sebastiao tirelessly fought for a more just, humane and ecological world,” Salgado’s family said in a statement. Working mostly in black and white, Salgado garnered widespread acclaim at home and abroad with his striking images of the natural world and the human condition, often travelling around the globe to photograph impoverished and vulnerable communities. In all, he worked in more than 120 countries throughout his career.Salgado was especially interested in the plight of workers and migrants, and spent decades documenting nature and people in the Amazon rainforest. He captured some of his most well-known images in 1986, when he photographed workers toiling in a gold mine in northern Brazil. The photo essay was featured on the cover of The New York Times Magazine and cemented Salgado’s reputation as one of the star photographers of his time.In the 1980s, Salgado also moved audiences worldwide with a series of pictures depicting the famine in Ethiopia. That work earned him worldwide recognition and won some of photography’s most prestigious awards.In 1991, while on assignment in Kuwait, Salgado photographed workers struggling to extinguish oil-well fires set by Saddam Hussein’s troops, an environmental disaster that came to define Iraq’s turbulent retreat from Kuwait. “The photos were beyond extraordinary,” said Kathy Ryan, a former photo director at The New York Times Magazine, who worked with him on that assignment. “It was one of the best photo essays ever made.“On another noteworthy assignment, Salgado documented dramatic scenes following a failed assassination bid on President Ronald Reagan in 1981. He photographed the gunman, John Hinckley Jr, moments after he was tackled to the ground. “He had an uncanny sense of where important stories were,” said Ryan.Known for his intense blue-eyed gaze and his rapid way of speaking, Salgado was remembered by his colleagues as a defender of documenting the human condition who respected the people he photographed. He was at times criticised for cloaking human suffering and environmental catastrophe in a visually stunning aesthetic, but Salgado maintained that his way of capturing people was not exploitative. “Why should the poor world be uglier than the rich world?” he asked in an interview with The Guardian in 2024.“The light here is the same as there. The dignity here is the same as there.”Over the course of his career, Salgado’s work won some of photography’s top prizes, including two Leica Oskar Barnack Awards and several World Press Photo awards. Sebastiao Ribeiro Salgado Jr was born Feb 8, 1944, in Aimores, in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. An economist by training, Salgado discovered photography while working for the World Bank and traveling to Africa.
