Sebastião Salgado, one of the world's greatest photographers, dies

Sebastião Salgado , one of the greatest photographers in the world, died this Friday the 23rd, at the age of 81. The cause of death was not disclosed, although Salgado was suffering from problems resulting from malaria that he contracted in the 1990s. He lived in Paris, France .

Sebastião Ribeiro Salgado Júnior was born in the city of Aimorés, Minas Gerais, in 1944. In his five-decade career, he photographed the lives of the less fortunate all over the world: war refugees, workers subjected to extreme physical efforts, indigenous communities on the fringes of modernity and remote landscapes not yet affected by industrialization.

“It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Sebastião Salgado, our founder, mentor and eternal inspiration,” reads an excerpt from the statement released on social media by Instituto Terra, an institution that Salgado founded. “Sebastião was much more than one of the greatest photographers of our time. Alongside his life partner, Lélia Deluiz Wanick Salgado, he sowed hope where there was devastation and made the idea that environmental restoration is also a profound gesture of love for humanity flourish. His lens revealed the world and its contradictions; his life, the power of transformative action.”

On Wednesday 21st, Forbes Brazil published an interview with Salgado. In the conversation, he spoke about his exhibition, which is open to the public until June 1st at the Les Franciscaines cultural center, in the French commune of Deauville.

“When we got there, we took a tour of the exhibition. And for me, it was like taking a tour of my own life. I had the privilege — because it is a privilege — of being able to go to all these places. Sometimes people say to me: ‘Sebastião, you are an artist.’ And I say: ‘No, I am a photographer.’ Because only photographers have the right to doubt. When we go to all these regions of the world, facing all the problems and challenges you can imagine, we ask ourselves: about ethics, legitimacy, safety. And it is up to us to find the answer, alone,” he said, when asked to describe his current exhibition.

In another passage, when asked to talk about the records he made of the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, Salgado mentioned that he was ashamed of being a photographer at that time. “It was so brutal that I got sick – really sick. I was ashamed of being a photographer. I was ashamed of being part of the human species, because until then, I had only photographed one species: ours.”

Sebastião Salgado has received prestigious awards such as the Prince of Asturias and the Hasselblad Foundation International Prize, and was the protagonist of Wim Wenders' Oscar-nominated documentary The Salt of the Earth , about his travels to remote locations such as the Arctic Circle and Papua New Guinea, which informed his book, Genesis (2013).

It was with his first book, Outras Américas (1984), a portrait of indigenous peoples, that he achieved fame, consecrated two years later with the photographs of Serra Pelada (Pará), the largest open-pit gold mine in the world, where for 35 days he lived with thousands of men covered in mud and in inhumane conditions. This was followed by another anthological work, Êxodos (2000), about forced migrations in 40 countries.