Reputations: Sebastião Salgado & Lèlia Wanick Salgado

Architectural Review, September, 2025

Sebastião Salgado, who died earlier this year, stands among the most significant photographers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. There was an unmistakable power to his imagery and the moral force that underscored it. The photographs were an insistence that human life, labour, conflict and the natural world demand both representation and attention. To appreciate Salgado’s life and work is to recognize his unique position: he was a witness to some of the most wrenching transformations of the modern era, a campaigning activist, and an artist who sought a difficult beauty and sense of hope.

Born in 1944 in Aimorés, in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, Salgado grew up in a rural environment. His early life was marked by landscapes of pastures, rivers, and forests. He trained as an economist, earning a master’s degree and undertaking work in international development. This sharpened his sensitivity to systems of inequality and the forces shaping labour and migration. Economics also gave him a framework for understanding the large structures behind poverty, displacement, war, and land management. He soon realized that photography offered a more visceral and immediate means of communication, but also something more complex and contemplative.

In 1967 Salgado married Lélia Wanick. It was she who first gave him a camera, and she who would remain intimately involved with his work in the decades to come. When the political situation in Brazil grew intolerable the couple moved to Paris. Around 1973, Salgado began to devote himself seriously to a life as a photojournalist and his career developed rapidly. He joined the photo agencies Sygma and Gamma, and by 1979 he was a member of the prestigious cooperative Magnum Photos. His affiliation with Magnum connected him to the tradition of socially engaged documentary photography exemplified by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa. Meanwhile, Wanick established the important magazines Photo Revue and Longue Vue, as well as a gallery space for Magnum Photos. She remained the great editor, curator and champion of Salgado’s work, eventually receiving an Oscar nomination as the producer of Salt of The Earth, the 2014 documentary about him, co-directed by Wim Wenders and the son of Salgado and Wanich, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado.

Right from the start, Salgado’s images were distinguished by their classical framing and deep chiaroscuro. In some ways, he seemed a man out of time, or at least a little late. The mid-century heyday of photojournalism, when the mass circulation illustrated magazines dominated visual culture, had clearly passed. Nevertheless, here was a photographer, working in black and white, composing his shots and printing his images to wring every ounce of pictorially coded emotion from every square inch of their surfaces. If Salgado’s visual sensibilityechoed anything it was the landmark Life magazine photo essays of W. Eugene Smith. Both men were staunchly independent, almost maniacally driven perfectionists whose commitment to their chosen themes and subjects seemed to stop at nothing. Life ceased publication in 1972, just asSalgado was getting going.

In the 1980s many documentarists, Martin Parr among them, switched to colour, while also switching from photographing the world of work and production to the world of leisure and consumerism. Salgado remained the rear guard, upholding that older set of concerns, and with an aesthetic that upheld the history of heroic photojournalism that was now being packaged as books, sold as prints, and taught in the expanding world of photo education.

Salgado’s first major publication, edited by Wanick, was Other Americas, 1986. Made over a period of seven years in rural Latin America, it was gentle and lyrical work, chronicling marginalized lives with both empathy and aesthetic rigor. It was his meditation on the persistence of traditional ways of life amid modernization and political upheaval. Indigenous peoples and rural workers are not relics but living communities negotiating transition. His compositions often recalled biblical scenes (groups on hilltops, central figures surrounded by a supporting cast, often bathed in unearthly light). Quite how conscious Salgado was of these ancient pictorial strategies is a moot point, but he continued to refine and even exaggerate them, often to the ire of his critics. Couldn’t he just photograph what he saw without turning it all into a history painting?

If Other Americas represented Salgado’s lyric humanism, his photographs of the Kuwaiti oilfields in 1991 showcased his capacity to capture apocalyptic devastation. In the aftermath of the Gulf War, retreating Iraqi forces set fire to hundreds of oil wells in Kuwait, creating one of the largest man-made environmental catastrophes in history. The sky darkened with smoke, the desert became slick with oil, and firefighters battled infernos under nightmarish conditions. In retrospect, it is clear that this was a moment in which war reportage was morphing into environmentalist photography. Salgado was making depictions not of war’s immediate carnage—dead bodies or combat—but rather of its ecological and existential aftermath. Destruction lingers long after battles end. This was photography almost as allegory: a vision of geopolitics at war with the planet. It also signalled Salgado’s growing preoccupation with global issues that transcend national borders—environmental catastrophe, industrial exploitation, and the consequences of modern economies dependent on extractive industries. Oil is a problem even when its wells are not being sabotaged.

Workers: An Archaeology of the Industrial Age was Salgado’s magnum opus on labour in the modern world. Published in 1993 after six years of work, it spanned continents and industries, presenting a vast visual archive of manual work. Miners in Brazil, ship breakers in Bangladesh, steel workers in China, coffee pickers in Central America, and countless others. The unifying theme was the dignity and intensity of human physical labour. At a time when automation and globalization were already transforming economies, Workers can be read as both celebration and elegy. It reveals the immense energy and sacrifice of workers whose toil built the contemporary world, while also suggesting that such forms of work were vanishing in the electronic age. Salgado framed labour not simply as an economic activity but as a cultural and historical phenomenon, something that deserves serious documentation.

Critics sometimes accused Salgado of aestheticizing suffering, of making exploitation look beautiful. Defenders argued that his commitment to form was inseparable from his grounded and engaged humanism. Seen as ‘iconic’ photographs alone on a gallery wall or the in white expanse of a coffee-table book, it can be hard to disagree with the critics. But that’s what happens when photographs are plucked from the bodies of work, and from the captions and stories from which they come. It seems churlish to blame Salgado for making sustained bodies of work that contained so many striking photographs.  

In 1998, Salgado and Wanick founded the Instituto Terra, a non-profit organization focused on environmental restorationand research, and reforestation in the Vale do Rio Doce region of Brazil. The area was a former cattle farm of utterly degraded land. Meanwhile Salgado was turning his cameraincreasingly toward environmental subjects, culminating in his project Amazônia 2021. Over several years he travelledthrough the Brazilian Amazon, working with Indigenous communities. The photographs present lush forests, sweeping rivers, and portraits, emphasizing ecological balance and cultural continuity. Indigenous peoples are understood as stewards of the environment, guardians of a knowledge that modern society is in danger of destroying. Amazônia also carried a strong activist dimension with a call to preserve the planet’s ‘lungs’.

It is worth noting that by this point Salgado had fully embraced digital photography, while still adhering to a black and white aesthetic rooted in the traditional photographic darkroom. He had found a way to manipulate his image files and then make prints that mimicked the highly wrought look of his analogue work. Many assumed he had simply ignored the digital realm altogether, rather than bending it to his own aesthetic will.    

It was around the time of the publication of Amazônia that I first met Salgado, hosting an online conversation with him for the International Center of Photography (ICP), where I am Creative Director. We were joined by an audience of over two thousand people from around the world – a testament to Salgado’s passionate global following. ICP has been particularly important for the reception and recognition of his work in the US. Founded by Cornell Capa in 1974, it has long championed ‘concerned photography’ that is committed to social engagement and justice, an ethos well aligned with Salgado’s own, and we have hosted major exhibitions of hiswork, including Workers and Migrations.

I last saw Sebastião at his busy studio and office in Paris, in 2023. Gracious and welcoming, we sat and talked as he explained the incredible progress of the Instituto Terra and the reception of the Amazônia project. His public image was always of a man looking forward, embattled but optimistic, with a love of detail but an understanding wide enough to get big, visionary things done. In conversation however, a certain melancholy crept in, and with a moist eye. He never seemed to me a man of regret, but there was a sense that life – human life, and his own particular life, had taken a wrong turn with no path back, only forward. I wondered whether his attraction to photography, and Lélia’s inspired hunch that it would be his medium, were somehow connected with the camera’sapparent stopping of time, pausing the world between an irrecoverable past and a future both foreseen and unforeseen. “Come downstairs!”, he announced with a clap of his hands. In the basement, a dedicated team was embarked upon the gargantuan task of organizing and digitally archiving his life’s work. Half a century of intense photographic observation on every continent. Many extraordinary images, overlooked when they were first taken, were being discovered on his contact sheets.

When a major photographer dies, there is usually a period of a few years, perhaps half a decade, in which they are reduced to a media friendly set of ‘greatest hits.’ Undoubtedly, SebastiãoSalgado’s hits are as great as anyone’s. After a while, however, curiosity and the corrective nature of history revisits the work. Salgado left us as one of the most famous and influential photographers there has ever been, but I suspect we have yet to see the full scope of his achievement, and the full value of his legacy. No doubt Lélia Wanick will play a role in this, while the exemplary work of the Instituto Terra will continue.