Sebastião Salgado, the internationally acclaimed Brazilian photographer and environmentalist whose black-and-white images chronicled the dignity of workers, the plight of migrants, and the unspoiled beauty of the planet, died on May 23, 2025 at the American Hospital in Paris. He was 81. His death was confirmed by Instituto Terra, the environmental organization he co-founded with his wife, Lélia Wanick Salgado, and the French Académie des Beaux Arts. The cause of his death was not disclosed.
With a camera lens as his compass, Salgado journeyed across more than 120 countries, often to the most remote and fragile corners of the Earth. His images, monumental in scale and moral gravity, captured famine, war, exodus, and labor with a reverence usually reserved for religious icons. For Salgado, photography was not just a profession; it was a form of bearing witness, a visual testimony to both the suffering and the resilience of humanity.
Born on February 8, 1944, in the small town of Aimorés in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, Sebastião Ribeiro Salgado grew up on a cattle ranch. He initially pursued economics, studying at the Federal University of Espírito Santo and later earning a doctorate at the University of Paris. It was while working for the International Coffee Organization in the early 1970s that Salgado first picked up a camera, documenting rural life and labor during work trips across Africa. What began as a side interest quickly evolved into a life-defining vocation.
By 1973, Salgado had committed to photography full time. He began his career with Sygma and Gamma photo agencies, and later joined Magnum Photos, the legendary cooperative of photographers. In 1994, with Lélia, he established his own agency, Amazonas Images, based in Paris. This allowed him greater independence to pursue long-term projects that married photojournalism with artistic vision and social engagement.
Salgado’s major photographic essays — Workers (1993), Migrations (2000), and Genesis (2013) — each took years to complete and defined the arc of his career. Workers was a paean to manual labor and its disappearing traditions, with unforgettable images of gold miners in Brazil, oil-field workers in Kuwait, and ship-breakers in Bangladesh. Migrations focused on the massive movements of people driven by war, poverty, and globalization — from Rwandan refugees to Kosovar Albanians, and from Latin American peasants to Sahelian pastoralists.
But it was Genesis, his most personal and optimistic work, that marked a spiritual turning point. Conceived as a photographic tribute to unspoiled nature, Genesis took Salgado to the Arctic, the Galápagos Islands, the Amazon, and other landscapes where humanity has left only a light footprint. The series, rich with elemental drama and reverence, was also a meditation on climate change, loss, and redemption.
Salgado’s images were invariably in black and white — a deliberate aesthetic that stripped away distraction and focused the viewer on form, texture, and emotion. His subjects often appeared monumental, as if carved from the earth itself. Critics have likened his work to that of Ansel Adams for its environmental focus, and to Dorothea Lange and Lewis Hine for its social conscience.
He was frequently honored throughout his career, receiving the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund Grant, the Hasselblad Award, the Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts, and membership in the prestigious Académie des Beaux-Arts in France. In 2015, he was the subject of the Oscar-nominated documentary The Salt of the Earth, co-directed by Wim Wenders and his son, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado.
Though he was often associated with scenes of hardship and human suffering, Salgado never succumbed to cynicism. Instead, his later life was marked by a profound commitment to environmental restoration. In the 1990s, after years of photographing famine in Africa and violence in Rwanda, Salgado returned to Brazil physically and emotionally depleted. The lush Atlantic Forest he had known as a child had been devastated by deforestation. But rather than despair, Salgado and Lélia resolved to act.
In 1998, they founded Instituto Terra on a 1,700-acre stretch of degraded land in Aimorés. Over the next two decades, they and a team of ecologists planted more than 2.5 million native trees, restoring the area to a thriving tropical forest. The institute became a model for sustainable development and ecological education, proof that hope could be not just imagined but planted and grown.
Salgado often described photography as a way of communicating the silent suffering of the voiceless to the world. But his work went beyond journalism; it elevated his subjects, endowing them with a universal humanity that resisted reduction to statistics or headlines. Whether capturing the sinewy muscles of a Sudanese farmer or the frozen determination in a Siberian reindeer herder’s eyes, Salgado sought to create empathy through beauty and scale.
He was not without critics. Some accused him of aestheticizing misery, of turning suffering into art. But Salgado always maintained that his aim was not to exploit but to elevate, to confront the viewer with the complexity and dignity of lives too often ignored.
He is survived by his wife and creative partner, Lélia, and their two sons, Juliano — a filmmaker — and Rodrigo. In interviews, Salgado credited Lélia not only for managing his career but for shaping the thematic and visual unity of his work. “Without her,” he once said, “none of this would have been possible.”
For several years now, the world of photography has been celebrating the legacy of Sebastião Salgado, in a tribute as vast as the landscapes he photographed and as lasting as the forests he helped replant. His work will live on — in books, museums, classrooms, and the newly green hills of Brazil — as a testimony to the power of seeing, the duty of caring, and the possibility of renewal. He believed, against all odds, that the Earth could heal, and that we — given vision and courage — could help it do so.
More information about Sebastiao Salgado here.
