Sebastião Salgado, the Brazilian-French photographer renowned for his distinctively luminous black-and-white images documenting the lives of ordinary people and other creatures across the world, died May 23 at age 81. He and I met in 1994, when I directed Unicef’s global photography and helped coordinate a trip for him to document the impact on children of the intensifying wars in several emerging states of the former Yugoslavia.
In 2001, Salgado was appointed a Unicef Goodwill Ambassador, the only photographer so recognized. His cultural and professional experience brought an intimate familiarity to Unicef’s humanitarian and development mandate: a childhood in rural Brazil, a refugee from that country’s military dictatorship in 1969 and a life’s work witnessing the fates of the dispossessed. The 1990s had been a turbulent decade, including the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, a disheartening coda to a century that had witnessed some of humanity’s most extreme violence and, post-World War II, some of its greatest leaps forward in survival, cooperation, prosperity and enshrined human rights.
These blazing contradictions were exceptionally and eloquently expressed in Salgado’s work. First an economist, he turned to photojournalism in the early ’80s. The work included an essay on drought-stricken people in Africa’s Sahel region and a multicountry view of the daily lives of Latin America’s culturally rich poor, including a spectacular 1986 essay on Brazil’s Serra Pelada open-pit gold miners. The deep humanism and dramatic framing of these photographs made Salgado one of the West’s most sought-after visual reporters.
His equally distinguishing gift was an insistence on contextualizing these visual fractions of seconds within broad social surveys that he documented over several years. First published in magazine features, they were then curated into books and major exhibitions. In 1993, his study, “Workers,” an “archeology” of manual labor around the world, was released in multiple countries. In 2000, that study was followed with “Migrations,” capturing the planet-spanning human migrations in search of work or refuge from conflicts and other disasters. “The Children,” a companion book to his migration opus, underscored Salgado’s alignment with Unicef. It features straight-on portraits, individual and serious, of some of the child refugees and migrants he had encountered. They meet his camera with their own irrefutable gaze.
Salgado also spent more than a year working with Unicef and the World Health Organization to cover the global campaign to eradicate polio in several countries in South Asia and Africa. By 2002, it was the largest public health initiative in history, vaccinating more than 500 million children in 93 countries. Polio, which primarily affects children, is the second global infectious disease for which eradication is considered viable (the first is smallpox, which was eradicated in 1980 after a three-decades-long effort). By the early 2000s, the polio vaccination campaign had reduced global annual cases by 99 percent, a stupendous achievement. In 2003, only seven countries still had cases of wild poliovirus, with hoped-for zero cases by 2005.
Salgado’s photography significantly raised the campaign’s profile in several major Western magazines and culminated in a 2003 book, website and exhibition titled “The End of Polio: A Global Effort to End a Disease.” But it was not the end of the disease: it remains endemic in Afghanistan and Pakistan with outbreaks in dozens of other countries, an eradication frustrated by variant virus strains, waning immunity in high-risk districts, persistent conflicts, inadequate national health infrastructure and funding challenges (made worse, beginning in 2020, by the Covid-19 pandemic). As ever, the bottom line is political will: otherwise highly feasible, the end of polio depends on a shift in this fundamental complacency.
Salgado’s work also became entangled in the 1990s debates about excessive media visuals of faraway extreme suffering, debates in which Unicef was deeply involved. As more social documentary photographs entered the art world, a few prominent critics in certain Western capitals began questioning the ethics of showing esthetically powerful images of real-life suffering on art gallery or museum walls — deeming it exploitative displays of “beautiful suffering,” as a 2006 exhibit called it. Salgado, then at the height of his fame, became a prime target of these criticisms as his exhibitions were shown in cities around the world (in 1991, 1995 and 2001 in New York City, for example), attracting mainstream media coverage and packed viewings.
Published in news stories, his photographs rarely disturbed these critics: it was the profiling of his work in the art world that they objected to. Though the attacks exposed a highly insular art milieu, they influenced broader perceptions of the value of seeing and entering the lives of the less-privileged, of using all cultural spaces to consider pressing social issues and, ultimately, of what constitutes art. Under the guise of esthetic concerns or a sheen of moralism (and despite the broader art world’s embrace of Salgado’s work), they were emblematic of legitimate critiques of the excessive use of clichéd images of suffering veering wildly off the rails.
These critics implied that because photographs depict real people, their dignity, evident in so many Salgado images, would be more respected if their suffering was not represented as art. Of course, artists have long depicted gruesome wars and other human suffering and violence, while most of Salgado’s photographs at the end of the 20th century were not of war but of manual workers or people displaced by economic and conflict upheavals.
There was also a not-infrequent insinuation that Salgado’s subjects’ often extreme poverty was somehow unseemly (rather than unjust), a less explicit stance because it is even more indefensible than claiming that contemporary documentary photographs on these topics are intrinsically exploitative or not art. Lost amid this focus on style or motive is the content of the images, what they say about our common world, about the people depicted, about us and about what can be done.
Salgado mostly sidestepped these debates. “I do not originate from the North of the planet . . . [so] don’t share the same feelings of guilt as some of my colleagues,” he said in a 2014 interview with a French journalist, Isabel Francq. He nevertheless aligned his work with those colleagues, saying:
“. . . I saw so much suffering, hatred and violence in the course of my reportages for Migrations that I emerged from it extremely shaken. But I have no regrets. . . . No one has the right to protect himself from the tragedies of his time, because we are all responsible in a certain way. . . . Photographers are there to act as mirrors . . . so don’t talk to me about voyeurism! The voyeurs are the politicians who stood idly by.”
In the 21st century — having witnessed the degraded landscapes of global resource extraction, industrial offal, mega-city miseria and the conflicts these engendered in previous decades — Salgado created an extended homage, “Genesis,” to the earth’s still-pristine places, animals and Indigenous inhabitants not yet ravaged by rapacious human expansion (2013). He then revisited the forests and native peoples of Brazil’s Amazonia (2021).
At the same time, with his life and work partner Lélia Wanick Salgado, he committed to reviving the almost barren land of his parents, formerly a cattle ranch, in Aimorés, Brazil, where he was born. Together, he and his wife created Instituto Terra, attracting national and international donors to plant millions of trees and restore a verdant landscape of native plants and animals, with a conservation teaching facility and another legacy to outlive them both.
Referencing Salgado’s “Genesis” project, several people asked at the time how it related to Unicef’s mandate. I said it reminded me of the African proverb in Unicef’s lobby then: “The world was not left to us by our parents but lent us by our children.” So, it was appropriate to have an ambassador focused on the value and beauty of the ecosystem that is our most fundamental legacy to children. This now-threatened legacy was luminously rendered in “Genesis,” in his images of humanity’s follies and tenderness as well as in the restoration of his homeland in Aimorés.
Finally, other mementos from working with Salgado: his frequent, quiet singing to himself between engagements and the articulate simplicity of his extemporaneous public speaking about his work and life passions. After his death in May, from a leukemia likely linked to a form of malaria he contracted in 2010, he was buried in the famed Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, among many other fellow artists, thinkers and political giants.
This is an opinion essay.
We welcome your comments on this article. What are your thoughts on Salgado's work for the UN?
Related Posts
Wonderful tribute to a great human being Ellen. You sent me to interview him in Paris in 2006 and he was such a gracious host. I was honoured to meet the great, but humble, man.
I do not understand certain kind of critics. Long live Salgado’s photographs in all fields and his legacy. Thank you for the article
Beautiful tribute
Serious & instructive
Thank you to the author, & to Pass Blue for addressing the wider cultural context of humanitarian work.
Wonderful tribute, Ellen!
Thanks for a meaningful and insightful tribute to Salgado, one of the best documentary photographers of our time.
Beautiful tribute, Ellen.