Aimorés (Brasil), 1944
By Ivana Jinkings
Internationally recognized as one of the greatest photographers of his time, Sebastião Salgado studied economics in Brazil between 1964 and 1967, earning his master’s degree from the University of São Paulo (USP) and Vanderbilt University (USA). After completing his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Paris in 1971, he worked for the International Coffee Organization in London until 1973. A transformative trip to Africa led him to switch from economics to photography. He then worked for the agencies Sygma (1974-1975) and Gamma (1975-1979) before joining the renowned international photographers’ cooperative Magnum Photos, which he presided over until 1994. Based in Paris, he covered significant events such as the wars in Angola and Spanish Sahara, the Israeli hostage crisis in Entebbe, and the assassination attempt on U.S. President Ronald Reagan.
Alongside his photojournalistic work, Salgado began focusing on personal projects. From 1977 to 1984, he traveled extensively across Latin America, resulting in the exhibition Other Americas (1986), exploring rural cultures and the cultural resilience of Indigenous populations in Mexico and Brazil. In the 1980s, he spent 15 months with the French group Doctors Without Borders during the Sahel drought in Africa, leading to the photo series Sahel: Man in Distress (1986). From 1986 to 1992, he created the series Workers, documenting and examining the labor crisis in 26 countries.
In 1994, Salgado founded his own agency, Amazonas Images. Always photographing in black and white, he produced Terra: Struggle of the Landless (1997), about Brazil’s land reform social movement. In 2000, he completed two landmark projects, Exodus and Children, capturing the lives of displaced people, refugees, and migrants in 41 countries. Appointed UNICEF Special Representative in 2001, Salgado donated reproduction rights of many of his works to support social causes, including the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST) and the Global Movement for Children.
Salgado has won most of the world’s major photography awards, including the Eugene Smith Award for Humanitarian Photography (1982), the World Press Award (Netherlands, 1985), the Oscar Barnack Award (Germany, 1985 and 1992), the Olivier Rebbot Award (1987), the Erna and Victor Hasselblad Award for Lifetime Achievement (Sweden, 1989), and the Paris Match Gold Award for Lifetime Achievement (Trophy “Match d’Or”, 1993).
He won the Photojournalist of the Year Award from the International Center of Photography in New York three times (1986, 1988, and 1990) and has published several books, including An Uncertain Grace (USA, 1990), Sebastião Salgado – Best Photos (Brazil, 1992), In Human Effort (Japan, 1993), Workers (1993), La Main de l’Homme (France, 1993), Terra (Brazil, 1997), Africa (Germany, 2007), and Genesis (Germany, 2013), which was accompanied by a major exhibition.
He was honored with a monograph in the Photopoche series by France’s Centre National de la Photographie in 1993. In 2001, he received honorary doctorates from the University of Évora (Portugal), the New School University in New York, and the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University, as well as the Muriqui Prize from Brazil’s National Atlantic Forest Biosphere Reserve Council. In 2005, he was invited by the General Council of Val-de-Marne, France, to exhibit forty photographs from his project Man and Water. He currently lives in Paris with his wife and collaborator, Lélia Wanick Salgado, who has designed the layouts for most of his books.
