The iconic black and white photography of Sebastião Salgado

With his powerful black-and-white images, Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado captures the innermost essence of man and how we treat our planet.

WORDS: OSKAR HAMMARKRANTZ, PHOTOGRAPHY: Sebastião Salgado

January, 1979. A young boy playing on the banks of a small river finds a 6-gramme nugget of gold. The word spreads like wildfire and by the end of the week, 10,000 gold-diggers made their way into Serra Pelada in the Amazon… the largest gold rush since the days of the Klondike. Photographer Sebastião Salgado travelled to the site and was met by what can only be described as hell on Earth. He saw the most violent and dangerous mining excavation of all time.

While the miners were searching, a small town quickly rose up around them, filled with prostitution, alcohol and drugs, and most of all, brutal violence. The town saw 60 to 80 murders a month, all of which were unpunished.

“My hair stood on end. I’ve travelled to many places worldwide but never saw one like the chaotic Serra Pelada. No one was taken away by force, but they all became slaves to the dream of gold and the need to stay alive once they arrived. I found an extraordinary and tormented vision of the human being: thousands of men sculpted by mud and dreams. I’d returned to the beginning of time,” he said in a 1981 Esquire interview.)

Gold Mine of Serra Pelada, Pará, Brazil, 1986.

By this time, Salgado was already an established photographer and a member of Magnum, the international photography cooperative founded in 1947 by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa and others. Before Magnum, he freelanced as a photojournalist for the Sygma agency in Paris and worked for Gamma from 1975 until 1979. However, the breathtaking black-and-white photos of men drenched in mud, fighting for gold and their lives, made Salgado count as one of the most important photojournalists of our time, even though he doesn’t really like the categorisation.

“I’m not a social photographer. I’m not an economic photographer. I’m not a photojournalist. Photography is much more than that. Photography is my life. It’s my way of life, and my language.”

Salgado was born in 1944 and grew up on a farm in the Minas Gerais region of Brazil. He trained as an economist, gaining a Master’s degree from the University of São Palo, before earning a PhD from the University of Paris. His first position was as an economist for the United Nations-affiliated International Coffee Organisation, a job that took him around the world. It was during these years of travelling that he started seriously taking photographs. In 1973, he quit his job to become a full-time photographer.

"Photography is my life. It’s my way of life, and my language.”

Knowing that Salgado trained and worked as an economist, it is easy to find a common thread running through his work as a photographer. From the gold rush in the Amazon to the oil fires in Kuwait, the famine in Ethiopia, the war in Rwanda, the drought in Niger, and refugees in Bosnia, you can see a critical eye focused on economics as an inescapable force, moulding our lives and our planet.

“When you consider a photographer, he’s the fruit of his heritage. My visual heritage comes from the mountains where I grew up and a lot of my intellectual heritage comes from being an economist. The economics I did was not the economics of business administration; it’s not micro. I did macroeconomics – the economics of public finances and political economy. That kind of economics is a kind of quantified sociology, so that kind of preparation gave me real training.”

Sebastião Salgado Shaman Ângelo Barcelos, from the community of Maturacá, interacts with Xapiri spirits in visions during an ascent to Pico da Neblina.Yanomami Indigenous territory, state of Amazonas, 2014.

For the project Genesis, Salgado travelled the world for eight years, which resulted in more than 200 spectacular black and white photographs of arctic and desert landscapes, tropical rainforests, marine and other wildlife, and communities still living according to ancestral traditions, thereby raising public awareness about the issues of environmental stewardship and climate change.

Salgado’s quest to capture nature in its original state began in 2004 and of that particular project he says, “Genesis is a quest for the world as it was, as it was formed, as it evolved, as it existed for thousands of years before modern life accelerated and began distancing us from the very essence of our being. It is testimony that our planet still harbours vast and remote regions where nature reigns in silent and pristine majesty,” said his wife Lélia Wanick Salgado, with whom the photographer works closely.

Together, the couple have founded a small organisation named Instituto Terra to restore a part of the Atlantic Forest in Brazil. The organisation aims to plant millions of trees to revive the lush forest that was once there. In 1998, they succeeded in turning 17,000 acres into a nature reserve, and after 20 years, the tropical forest has finally returned to its former glory.

For his most recent project, named Amazonia, Salgado embarked on a new series of expeditions to capture the natural diversity of the Brazilian rainforest and the ways of life of its inhabitants by staying in remote villages for several weeks at a time.

“I’m 100 per cent sure that my photographs would not do anything alone. But as part of a larger movement, I hope to make a difference. It isn’t true that the planet is lost. We must work hard to preserve it.”