Sebastião Salgado

SEBASTIAO SALGADO (Aimorés, Brazil, 1944–2025).
Untitled, Afghanistan, 1996.
Silver gelatin print.
Photographer’s credit embossed (in the margin).
Signed, dated, and annotated in pencil; artist’s stamp (on the reverse).
Listed in the catalog raisonné ÉXODOS, pp. 80–81.
Measurements: 37.4 x 51 cm.

Sebastião Salgado is a Brazilian social-documentary photographer and photojournalist. He has traveled to more than 100 countries for his photographic projects. Most of these have appeared in numerous publications and books. Traveling exhibitions of his work have been shown around the world. Gallery owner Hal Gould considers Salgado the best photographer of the early 21st century. He has received numerous international awards, including the 1998 Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts³ and the 1982 W. Eugene Smith Award for Humanitarian Photography⁴. He entered the field of photography relatively late in life, having previously trained and worked as an economist. He began his career as a photographer working for the Paris-based Gamma agency before joining Magnum Photos in 1979. In 1994, he left Magnum to found his own agency, Amazonas Images, in Paris, to represent his work. Salgado belongs to the tradition of socio-documentary photography: his work is notable for its documentation of people’s labor in less developed countries or in situations of poverty. In 2001, he was appointed a UNICEF Special Advocate for his work. He works on his own long-term projects, some of which have been published in books such as *Otras Américas* and *Éxodos*. Among his best-known photographs are those taken in the gold mines of Serra Pelada in Brazil. He typically photographs in black and white using a Leica. In 1989, he received the Hasselblad Foundation International Award. In June 2007, after receiving the Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts, a major retrospective exhibition of his work was held at the PHotoEspaña International Festival in Madrid, where he won the Audience Award. While Sebastião Salgado’s fame grew in the world of photography—as a member of the Magnum agency—his wife, Lélia Wanick, served as the editor of his works, overseeing their publication in books and exhibitions. In the 1990s, the couple decided to return to Minas Gerais, Brazil, where Sebastião’s family had left them a field that was completely ravaged, eroded, and parched. In 1998, they founded Instituto Terra, and with Lélia as the project’s president, they began reforesting the land. Using more than 4 million seeds of native species they had cultivated themselves, they completely reforested the Bulcao Estate with its original flora, bringing to life an iconic and hopeful project for the entire world. Published books: GOLD (2020), Genesis (2013), Exodus (2000), The Serra Pelada Gold Mine (1999), Terra (1997), Workers (1996), The Hand of Man (1993), Sahel: l’Homme en Détresse, Prisma Presse and Centre National de la Photographie, for Médecins sans frontières, France (1986), Other Americas (1986), Les Hmongs, Médecins sans frontières, Chêne/Hachette, Paris (1982).