Sebastião Salgado

From Economics to Photography: Reading Bodies and Land

Salgado was born in the farming region of Minas Gerais, Brazil, and studied economics. He and Lélia Wanick Salgado were involved in left-wing student politics under the military dictatorship and moved to France as political exiles in 1969^*1. In Paris, he worked as an economist for the International Coffee Organization, researching development projects in Africa. During a work trip to Africa in 1973, he borrowed Lélia’s camera and began photographing. After that experience, he left economics later that year to become a photographer^*25. Salgado later described photography as a language that could communicate without translation, while insisting that photographers needed knowledge of economics, politics, sociology, and anthropology^*4. His interest in production, development, famine, and population movement continued, but the unit of analysis shifted from statistics and policy to bodily movement, housing, working conditions, and the state of the land. Photography gave those changes a concrete form at the sites where they occurred and carried them across linguistic boundaries.

From News Assignments to Other Americas and Sahel: Defining His Own Subjects

During the 1970s, Salgado covered wars and political events for Sygma, Gamma, and Magnum Photos. At the same time, he undertook Other Americas, following rural communities in Latin America for seven years from 1977, and a fifteen-month project on famine in the Sahel with Médecins Sans Frontières. He increasingly photographed lives and social changes that continued after a news event had ended^*25. Out of this work came a method based on researching a region and a period in advance, then comparing several sites under a shared question. Lélia edited the photobooks, selected and sequenced the images, and curated the exhibitions, giving Salgado’s fieldwork the structure of a book and a gallery installation. Her role was so deeply built into the work that Salgado said he did not know where he ended and Lélia began^*2. In 1994 they founded Amazonas Images, creating a structure through which they could plan and manage their photobooks and exhibitions themselves^*1.

Workers: Recording the End of the First Industrial Revolution Through Physical Labor

Workers: An Archaeology of the Industrial Age brings together photographs of mining, shipbuilding, steelmaking, agriculture, fishing, and construction in different regions, documenting forms of manual labor that were disappearing as mechanization advanced and production sites were reorganized. Salgado explained that Marxism and an interest in the working class had informed his political activity, and that he chose this subject because he believed the forms of labor that sustained the first Industrial Revolution were approaching an end^*4. The Philadelphia Museum of Art likewise presents the project as an attempt to record the end of an era in which manual work stood at the center of industry^*8. The photographs repeat the actions of digging, carrying, cutting, and lifting, using composition to show where the body enters the production process. In The Rajasthan Canal, Rajasthan, India, individual workers and the enormous volume of labor mobilized for canal construction occupy the same frame^*10.

Serra Pelada: Photographing the Mine as a System of Production

The Serra Pelada sequence, emblematic of Workers, fills the frame with the steep slopes of an open-pit mine, workers carrying sacks, ladders, and muddy paths. Seen from a distance, the flow of workers in Serra Pelada, Brazil reads as part of a vast terrain; up close, muscles, fatigue, gazes, and the weight of the loads remain visible^*9. By placing both distances within the same series, Salgado connects the individual pursuit of gold with the scale of extraction that mobilized tens of thousands of bodies at once. Yet the crowds covering the slope and the severe contrasts of light and dark also turn the site into a biblical trial. Human labor moves to the foreground while wages, ownership, and mining rights recede. The image’s visual force can reveal a social structure and mythologize it at the same time.

The Photobook as Structure: Comparing Site-Based Chapters Across Continents

Salgado did not treat the photobook as a collection of signature images; he emphasized the meaning produced by photographs in combination. Political scientist James Johnson has described Salgado’s books as structures in which sequences give one another meaning beyond the emotional effect of an isolated photograph^*7. Within a mine or factory, a sequence may move from establishing views and crowds to individual portraits, hands and tools, and moments of rest. Chapters then place sequences from Brazil, Bangladesh, India, China, and other countries alongside one another. This two-level organization—shifts of viewpoint within a site and comparison among regions—makes both repeated forms of labor and differences in wages, technology, terrain, and labor organization visible. Migrations was produced simultaneously as a 432-page book with 330 photographs, a separate volume containing portraits of ninety-one refugee children, and a touring exhibition of more than 300 works, offering distinct ways to encounter borders, refugee camps, megacities, and family portraits^*25. Lélia edited the book and curated the exhibition, giving fieldwork from different regions the form of a book and a gallery installation^*26.

Migrations: How Reorganized Production Moves People

Made over roughly seven years, Migrations followed refugees, rural-to-urban migration, cross-border labor, and displacement caused by war and environmental destruction in more than thirty-five countries^*25. While working on Workers, Salgado came to see industrialization as changing the arrangement of families and populations as well as the form of labor. Citing Brazil’s shift from an agricultural to an industrial nation and the concentration of its rural population in cities, he explained how the reorganization of production systems generates migration^*4. He and Lélia were themselves political refugees from a military dictatorship and migrants who lived for many years outside their country. The population change he had studied in economics intersected with their experience of leaving home, informing the decision to address cross-border movement as a long-term series.

Black and White, Monumental Composition: Dignity and the Flattening of Historical Difference

Salgado used deep blacks, silvery light, and the tonal ranges of clouds, smoke, and mud to give photographs from different places a shared visual intensity. He rejected the idea that honesty required poor regions to be photographed harshly or unattractively, and spoke of giving his subjects the same attention to light, composition, and printing that would be given to the wealthy as a matter of dignity^*2. Yet when Serra Pelada, the Sahel, Rwanda, and the Balkans are presented in the same monumental black-and-white style, the enduring human figure can become the common denominator while the specific agents and causes in each place recede. The form works as an ethic against diminishing its subjects, but it can also obscure political responsibility.

Serra Pelada and Kuwait: Labor, War, and Environmental Damage

In the Serra Pelada photographs, bodies packed onto the slopes in search of gold give visible form to the scale of resource extraction. The print in MoMA’s collection was produced between 1986 and 1989 and demonstrates Salgado’s method of holding the crowd and the terrain within a single frame^*9. In Kuwait in 1991, he photographed crews extinguishing oil-well fires after the Gulf War. In Kuwait, 1991, published on the official Leica Oskar Barnack Award page, oil-soaked workers and black smoke register both as a record of labor and as damage left by war in the land and atmosphere^*13. The sequence offers a way to consider resource extraction, war, and environmental destruction through the working body.

Genesis: Placing Humanity Within Nature

After completing the projects culminating in Migrations—especially after years of witnessing genocide and refugee crises—Salgado became so disillusioned with humanity that he could no longer continue photographing. He took part in reforesting the family farm, an effort proposed by Lélia, and watching trees, water, birds, insects, and mammals return became the catalyst for his return to photography^*2. In 2004 he began Genesis, spending about eight years photographing polar regions, deserts, rain forests, oceans, animals, and communities in places relatively little affected by industrialization^*4. ICP organized the exhibition into five geographic sections, presenting it as a long-term project that moves across landscapes, wildlife, and communities^*15. Long-term research and wide-ranging comparison continued from Workers and Migrations, but the subject widened from people within social systems to ecosystems that include people.

Instituto Terra and Amazônia: Extending Responsibility Beyond the Photograph

Lélia and Salgado began planting trees on the degraded family farm and established Instituto Terra in 1998. UNESCO describes an effort that planted more than 2.7 million trees, restored ecosystems, protected soil and water sources, and advanced environmental education^*16. This work continued alongside Salgado’s later environmental photography. Amazônia was photographed over seven years and released as a photobook and exhibition in 2021^*1. Bringing forests, rivers, rain clouds, and Indigenous communities together in large-scale black-and-white photographs risks pushing differences in land rights, resource extraction, and state policy into the background of a nature presented for protection. At the same time, coupling environmental advocacy through photobooks and exhibitions with reforestation and education at Instituto Terra became a defining feature of Salgado’s later work, linking the circulation of images to activity on the land.

Reception in Japan: Long-Term Research and Serial Structure in Exhibition Form

The Tokyo Photographic Art Museum’s 2003 exhibition Sebastião Salgado: ESSAYS presented his research methods, grounded in economics and field data, through completed and ongoing projects^*18. The 2009 exhibition Africa brought new work from Genesis together with African projects dating from the 1970s, showing one hundred photographs in a display curated by Lélia^*19. Together, the exhibitions allowed viewers to follow the work across time and region, and from one series to another instead of encountering it through a single signature image. Reading locations, dates, and sequence side by side reveals Salgado’s method of comparing how shifts in population, labor, and resources register in bodies and everyday life across different places.

The Critique of “Aestheticized Suffering”: When Specific Events Become “Human Tragedy”

The central criticism of Salgado concerns the way events with different causes—gold-mine labor, famine, wartime refugees, and displacement after genocide—can be read as a universal “human suffering” through the same lyrical black and white and monumental composition. Writing in The New Yorker in 1991, Ingrid Sischy argued that historical and political differences were weakened as the photographer’s poetic unity came to dominate the subjects^*14. Susan Sontag similarly warned that bringing disasters from around the world into a single vast narrative could blur the policies, belligerents, and economic relations that produced suffering, leaving the impression of an irredeemable human tragedy^*20. The criticism therefore concerns whether the framing and sequence preserve the responsible agents and the conditions that could be changed.

The Defense of the Series: Can Cross-Regional Comparison Produce Solidarity?

Defenses of Salgado argue that isolating an iconic image strips away the relations constructed by the photobook. James Johnson criticized the view that photography’s political effect lies only in temporary sympathy with individual suffering, arguing that Salgado’s sequences can foster solidarity around collective problems by placing different people within the same economic and demographic transformations^*7. A wide view followed by a portrait and then comparable labor or movement in another country can dissolve the individual into an anonymous crowd, yet it can also compare that situation with recurring patterns elsewhere. Nieman Reports likewise values Salgado’s sustained engagement while discussing the unease surrounding the circulation of suffering as art^*21. Evaluation therefore requires attention to more than the artist’s intentions: the chapters, captions, and specific locations must remain legible within the monumental images.

Salgado’s Place: The Photobook as a Global Comparison of Labor and Migration—and Its Ethics

Salgado moved away from the short-term coverage through which news organizations report a single event. He followed a subject across several continents for years, assembling hundreds of photographs and texts into photobooks and touring exhibitions. Workers addressed the manual labor that sustained the first Industrial Revolution; Migrations examined the population movements produced by industrialization and urbanization; Genesis and Amazônia turned to the relationship between human economic activity and ecosystems. An exhibition at the Musée de l’Homme that paired his works with the articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights shows how the photographs have been used as public images through which to explain human rights beyond individual news events^*23. MoMA’s holdings show how his journalistic photographs entered the museum as fine prints for museum viewing^*24. The work circulated through photobooks, touring exhibitions, and museum collections. Salgado’s place in photographic history lies in this duality. He brought labor and migration across the world into wide circulation as comparable series of hundreds of black-and-white images, while leaving social documentary with the question of how fully such a comprehensive view can preserve local histories and the voices of its subjects.