A humanist photographer
Sebastião Salgado: The life and ideas of a humanist photographer
Sebastião Salgado is acknowledged as one of the world's greatest humanitarian and social photographers. All of his work is in black and white and typically celebrates the displaced and the disposed, focusing on the equal dignity of all people despite the injustices visited upon them by war and poverty.
Salgado’s life has always been linked to coffee. He was born into a large family on February 8, in 1944 in Aimorés in the inland state of Minas Geiras, Brazil. His father transported coffee to the ports along the coast and these journeys lent a lasting rhythm to his childhood. At 16 he moved to nearby Vitoria where he finished his studies and went on to university and, in 1967, married Lélia Deluiz Wanick
Salgado earned his M.A. in economics from the University of São Paul in Brazil and Vanderbilt University in the United States. After earning his Ph.D. in economics in 1971 at the University of Paris, he worked for the International Coffee Organization until 1973 where he furthered the diversification of coffee growing in Africa. And indeed, it was a trip to Africa in 1973 that changed his life when he borrowed his wife Lélia’s camera and switched to a career in photography. He then worked for many major photography agencies, including the legendary Magnum Photos international cooperative. He also returned to Africa in the mid-80s and documented the suffering and tragedy resulting from the drought in Sahel, the wide stretch of land running from the Atlantic Ocean to the African Horn containing the countries of Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, and Somalia. In 1994, Salgado formed his own agency, Amazonas Images, and continues to chronicle the lives of the world’s disposed.
Between 1986 and 2001 Salgado worked primarily on two projects: the first documented the end of large-scale industrial manual labor with the book Workers and exhibitions throughout the world. The second, published in two books Migration and The Children, relates the stories of refugees and migrants on the move in third world countries. Nearly all the books and most of the exhibitions around his projects were conceived and produced by Lélia Wanick Salgado.
Salgado currently lives in Paris and Brazil, and supports a project for the reforestation of the Atlantic strip of Brazil and for the ecological training of the farmers through his Terra Institute. Salgado is also a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador and an honorary member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences in the United States.