Sebastião Salgado, the Brazilian photographer and environmentalist famous for his work capturing, and helping maintain, the Amazon rainforest, has died.
For over five decades, Salgado’s social and documentary photography offered a humanistic view of disadvantaged populations around the world, while addressing key environmental issues. Salgado’s work as a photojournalist took him to over 120 countries.
Born in Aimorés, Minas Gerais, Brazil in 1944, he initially studied economics in São Paulo, before finding his feet in a revolutionary leftwing group working against the 1964–85 Brazilian military dictatorship.
In 1969, he and his wife Lélia Wanick Salgado moved to Paris in self-imposed exile. The two would become lifelong partners in art, too, Salgado’s agent telling the Guardian in a 2024 profile, ‘Salgado wouldn’t be Salgado without Lelia. She is central to everything he’s done.’ In 1998, they established Instituto Terra, a nonprofit reforestation organisation in Aimorés. To date, the institute has planted over 3 million trees.
Salgado remained a dedicated activist throughout his life. In 2020, he published an open letter and petition calling on more to be done to protect the country’s indigenous communities from the COVID-19 virus.
He died after complications from a form of malaria, which he contracted in 2010, and later developed leukemia.
