SAO PAULO (AP) — Brazilian photographer and environmentalist Sebastião Salgado, known for his award-winning images of nature and humanity, died at 81 from leukemia, his family said Friday.
“Through the lens of his camera, Sebastião tirelessly fought for a more just, humane, and ecological world,” Salgado's family said in a statement. “As a photographer who traveled the globe continuously, he contracted a particular form of malaria in 2010 in Indonesia while working on his Genesis project. Fifteen years later, complications from this illness developed into severe leukemia, which ultimately took his life.”
Earlier, Instituto Terra, which was founded by Salgado and his wife, and the French Academy of Fine Arts, of which he was a member, informed his death, but did not provide details on the circumstances or where he died.
“Sebastião was more than one of the best photographers of our time,” Instituto Terra said in a statement. “His lens revealed the world and its contradictions; his life, (brought) the power of transformative action.”
One of Brazil's most famous artists, though he always insisted he was a photographer first, Salgado had his life and work portrayed in the documentary film "The Salt of the Earth" (2014), co-directed by Wim Wenders and his son, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado.
‘An authentic and warm man’
He received a number of awards, and was elected an honorary member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences in the United States in 1992 and to the French Academy of Fine Arts in 2016.
“I pay tribute to the memory of an exceptional man — remarkable for his moral integrity, his charisma, and his commitment to serving art. He leaves behind a monumental body of work,” composer Petitgirard, secretary of the French Academy of Fine Arts, said in a statement.
François-Bernard Mâche, a major French composer who worked with Salgado for his exhibition “Aqua Mater” in Paris, said the Brazilian was an “authentic and warm man”.
“His gaze transformed landscapes, and beyond the spectacular, he reached a kind of inner truth (…). With him, photography fulfilled one of its highest ambitions by going far beyond mere appearances,” Mâche told The Associated Press.
Black and white
Born in 1944 in the city of Aimores, in the countryside of the Minas Gerais state in Brazil, Salgado moved to France in 1969 as Brazil endured a military dictatorship. He started to fully dedicate his time to photography in 1973, years after his economics degree.
His style is marked by black-and-white imagery, rich tonality, and emotionally charged scenarios. He had a particular interest in impoverished communities.
His main works include the recent “Amazonia” series, “Workers,” which shows manual labor around the world, and “Exodus” (also known as “Migrations” or “Sahel”), which documents people in transit, including refugees and slum residents.
Brazil's President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who received Salgado's support throughout his political career, requested a minute of silence during a ceremony in the capital city of Brasilia to honor "one of the greatest, if not the greatest, photographer the world has ever produced."
“His nonconformity with the fact that the world is so unequal and his stubborn talent in portraying the reality of the oppressed always served as a wake-up call for the conscience of all humanity,” Lula said. “Salgado did not only use his eyes and his camera to portray people: he also used the fullness of his soul and his heart.”
Love for the Amazon
Salgado and his wife had been working since the 1990s to restore part of the Atlantic Forest in Minas Gerais. In 1998, they turned a plot of land they owned into a nature reserve, according to Salgado’s biography on the French Academy of Fine Arts’ website. That same year, they created Instituto Terra, which promotes reforestation and environmental education.
Salgado and his wife, Lélia Wanick Salgado, founded Amazonas Images, an agency that exclusively handles his work.
He is also survived by his sons Juliano and Rodrigo.
Brazilian newspaper Folha de S.Paulo, which published several of Salgado's works over the last decades, said he recently cancelled a meeting with journalists in the French city of Reims due to health problems. He was scheduled to attend an exhibition with works by his son Rodrigo for a church in the same city on Saturday, the daily reported.
An exhibition of about 400 of Salgado's works is currently on display in the city of Deauville, in northern France. In an undated interview with Forbes Brasil published on Thursday, Salgado said that attending it felt like a stroll through his life.
“How many times in my life have I put my camera to the side and sat down to cry? Sometimes it was too dramatic, and I was alone. That's the power of the photographer; to be able to be there,” Salgado said. “If a photographer is not there, there's no image. We need to be there. We expose ourselves a lot. And that is why it is such an immense privilege.”
___ AP journalists Eléonore Hughes in Rio de Janeiro and John Leicester in Paris contributed.
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