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Remembering Sebastião Salgado
24 May 2025
Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado, known for his images the introduced the world to the Amazon rainforest among others depicting social injustice, died on Friday in Paris from leukemia. He was 81.
Instituto Terra, the environmental nonprofit he and his wife founded in Brazil, announced his passing. Salgado had likely developed the leukemia after contracting malaria that impaired his bone marrow function in 2010 while photographing in Indonesian New Guinea.
In a statement, his family said:
Through the lens of his camera, Sebastião tirelessly fought for a more just, humane and ecological world. Rich in humanistic content, this work offers a sensitive perspective on the most disadvantaged populations and addresses the environmental issues threatening our planet.
Brazil President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, observed a minute of silence when he learned of Salgado's passing. The photographer's work serves "a warning for the conscience of all of humanity", Lula said in a statement. "Salgado didn't only use his eyes and his camera to portray people: he also used the fullness of his soul and heart."
The French Academy of Fine Arts, of which Salgado was a member, described him as a "great witness to the human condition and the state of the planet."
He was born in Aimorés, the only son of a cattle-ranching family in the countryside of the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. He had seven sisters.
He met his future wife, Lélia Deluiz Wanick, in the 1960s while attending university to study economics. When a military dictatorship came into power in 1964, the couple moved to France.
He discovered photography while working for the World Bank in Africa. By 1973 he had become a freelance photographer and joined the Magnum collective. In 1994, he left Magnum to form his own agency with his wife.
In the late 1990s, he and his wife founded Instituto Terra in the region where he was born. The institute is dedicated to restoring the Atlantic Forest, which had been depleted by human encroachment. It has reforested over 2,000 hectares of land and produced nearly 7m seedlings since it was founded in 1998.
He took photos, mostly in black and white, in more than 130 countries over five decades, documenting workers and migrants as well as a 1980s famine in Ethiopia. In 1991 he photographed workers battling oil-well fires set by Saddam Hussein in Kuwait.
He photographed the Amazon's rivers and rainforests while also showing the impact of human beings on natural landscapes and the indigenous people fighting to preserve their environment.
He was also on the scene when John Hinckley Jr. shot President Ronald Reagan in 1981, photographing Hinckley as he was tackled to the ground.
He won two Leica Oskar Barnack Awards and several World Press Photo awards. He was named an honorary member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1992 and the French Academy of Fine Arts in 2016.
He was editing and curating his archive of over 500,000 pictures for sale when he died.
"I know I won't live much longer," Salgado told the Guardian in an interview last year. "But I don't want to live much longer. I've lived so much and seen so many things."
His wife survives him, as do two sons, Juliano and Rodrigo, and two grandchildren.