Sebastião Salgado, the photographer of the invisible, dies at 81.

BarcelonaSebastião Salgado, who died this Friday at the age of 81, was one of those exceptional photographers who had a global impact for the way he portrayed victims of the most atrocious situations and conflicts around the world over the years. His black and white photographs are monumental, and the compositions and gradation of tones are impeccable. According to several Brazilian media outlets, the cause of death was complications from the malaria he contracted in the 1990s.

Salgado was sometimes accused of aestheticizing the misfortunes of others, but he always defended himself. "What I want is for the world to remember the problems and the people I photograph. What I want is to create a discussion about what's happening around the world and provoke a debate with these images. Nothing more than that. I don't want people to look at them and appreciate the light and the palette of tones. I want them to look inside and see what the images represent."

For Salgado, photography is "a powerful writing that can be read all over the world without translation." And in his memoirs he defined himself very precisely: "Some say I'm a photojournalist. It's not true. Others say I'm an activist. That's not true either. The only truth is that photography is my life. All my photographs correspond to moments I've lived in my life, all the images exist because I noticed."

With his shaved head and penetrating gaze, he could have looked like a star, but the impression changed when he began to talk about his work, like when attended the ARA in December 2024 on the occasion of the exhibition at the Royal Shipyards of Barcelona, which opened days after receiving the first Joan Guerrero Award. "When people ask me how I came to social photography, I answer: it has been an extension of my political commitment and my origins," he also wrote in his memoirs. Throughout his career, Salgado also received the most important awards, including the World Press Photo Award, which he received three times, the Hasselblad Award, and the Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts (1998). He was also a member of the French Academy of Fine Arts, and Harvard University awarded him a doctorate. honoris causa.

From economist to photographer

Born on February 8, 1944, in Aimorés, in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, Salgado's training began in the field of law and then in economics. His discovery of photography was by chance, when his partner, Lélia Wanick, bought a camera while studying architecture in Paris, where they both emigrated in the wake of the Brazilian military dictatorship. Thus, in 1973, he definitively left economics to dedicate himself to photography.

"Photographs are nothing more than the symptoms of the dysfunction of this world in which we all participate," Salgado asserted. "Photographers are there to be their mirror, like journalists. And don't talk to me about voyeurism! The voyeurs are the politicians who allowed the Castro regime. They are the ones responsible, as well as the United Nations Security Council, which, with all its failures, did not prevent millions of murders from being committed."

Among Salgado's most notable projects are Other Americas, on the resistance of peasants and indigenous people throughout Latin America; Sahel: at the end of the road, which was a collaboration with Doctors Without Borders to bring awareness to hunger and humanitarian crises in Africa, and Workers, which led him to document the conditions of manual laborers in 26 countries. Later, he documented the gold rush in Brazil's Sierra Pelada, filled with workers in extreme conditions. Another monumental project was Exodus, which led him to photograph exiles, emigrants and refugees from 35 countries over six years.

Exodus It was one of Salgado's first major projects to be seen in Catalonia, specifically at La Pedrera. And in 2013, the CaixaForum in Barcelona exhibited Genesis, a call to preserve the planet, the result of eight years of traveling around the world to capture nature and human life in their purest state. "Photographing plants, minerals, and animals has been a novelty in my life as a photographer, which until then was completely dedicated to social issues. But with Genesis "I didn't forget humans. I simply went looking for them, just as we lived tens of thousands of years ago," Salgado said.

The last project was Amazon. "Bolsonaro has been a colossal predator, but by destroying it, he has contributed to the protection of the Amazon in a very interesting way. Before, no Brazilian was interested in the Amazon. Bolsonaro threatened indigenous tribes and ecosystems. Then indigenous leaders began today," he began today. NOW.

He himself started, in 1998, a project to contribute to the reforestation of the Amazon, the Tierra Institute. It was his way of recovering after falling ill due to all the terrifying things he saw while working in Exodus. "We quickly discovered we were environmentalists. But we didn't start out as environmentalists, because we had no idea what it meant to be an environmentalist. And today we are the largest environmental organization in Brazil: we have already planted more than 3 million trees," Salgado emphasized.