Renowned Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado died on May 23, 2025, in Paris at the age of 81. Having trained as an economist before picking up a 35mm camera in his late twenties, Salgado spent five decades documenting the monumental conditions of manual labor, mass migration, and threatened ecosystems across more than one hundred countries.
Salgado’s imagery was instantly recognizable through its velvet, silvery black-and-white tonalities, monumental chiaroscuro, and epic compositional grandeur. His 1986 photographs of the Serra Pelada open-pit gold mine in Brazil—depicting fifty thousand mud-caked men ascending fragile wooden ladders out of a gargantuan volcanic crater—evoked biblical frescoes or Dante's Inferno, imprinting the raw brutality of human labor indelibly upon global consciousness.
Throughout his career, this epic visual grandeur attracted persistent critical contestation. Critics such as Ingrid Sischy and Susan Sontag famously argued that Salgado's operatic, painterly aesthetic risked 'aestheticizing tragedy'—transforming famine, refugee exile, and crushing physical exploitation into sublime visual spectacles packaged for affluent museum galleries.
Yet for painters, Salgado's photographs were compelling precisely because they reclaimed an almost classical monumentality for the working-class body. While documentary photography often sought casual, fleeting snapshots, Salgado composed bodies with the anatomical gravity of Caravaggio or Théodore Géricault. In his epic series Workers (1993) and Migrations (2000), manual laborers and displaced families were never depicted as passive victims, but as heroic, dignified protagonists bearing the weight of global history.
In his later years, through the Instituto Terra, Salgado and his wife Lélia Wanick replanted over two million trees across deforested Brazilian valleys, turning toward ecological restoration. In death, Salgado leaves behind an extraordinary photographic monument: proof that the human figure, rendered with uncompromising formal gravity, can bear witness to both the horrors and the endurance of humanity.
Sources: Folha de S.Paulo (May 24, 2025); Le Monde (May 24, 2025); The New York Times (May 25, 2025).