All my projects are interconnected like different chapters of one book
“Every creative person has two dates of birth. The second date - when he understands what his true calling is - is much more important than the first,” said the famous Hungarian photographer Brassaï. Probably the same thing was meant by his no less famous compatriot, who said about himself: “Robert Capa was born in Paris at the age of 22.” And their Brazilian counterpart Sebastio Salgado(Sebastiao Salgado) could well say something similar about himself - especially since in him this “second birth” is expressed much more clearly than in the vast majority of his colleagues. It happened in the late 1960s and early 1970s. “My wife bought a camera while she was studying architecture in Paris,” Salgado described the beginning of this process, “I had never taken photographs before, but when I picked up the camera and looked through the viewfinder, I had great pleasure.”
Sebastio Salgado and his wife moved to Europe from Brazil just shortly before the events described. Then he dreamed of a career as an economist and was preparing with all his might to defend his doctoral dissertation. In the early 1970s, he traveled extensively throughout Africa as part of the economic programs of the International Bank. Having looked through the viewfinder of his wife's camera, he purchased his own Leica and naturally always took it with him. Gradually, photography captivated him more and more and, returning from another trip, he decided to start life “over” - this time as a photographer: “The pleasure was too great,” he later recalled, as if making excuses. By the way, the word “enormous” is his favorite adjective when it comes to photography.
Salgado settled in Paris, but it was almost impossible to find him at home: the photographer covered the wars in Angola and the Spanish (Western) Sahara, the famous operation to free Israeli hostages (Operation Entebbe), the assassination attempt on US President Ronald Reagan, and a number of other famous and not so famous incidents and conflicts. Already the first magazine and newspaper publications brought Sebastio Salgado world fame. In 1979 (long before the publication of his first book), he was invited to join the most famous association of documentary photographers in the world: the photo agency Magnum Photos.
The young photographer spent seven years from 1977 to 1984 on his first major project dedicated to Latin America. These years “were like traveling back in time seven centuries,” Salgado said. “I watched the flow of different cultures flow before me at a slow, extremely lazy pace - a pace that symbolizes the speed of time in this region - flowing by, so similar in their beliefs, history and suffering." The project resulted in the 1986 book Other Americas, by far the best account of the plight of the peasantry and indigenous peoples of Latin America.
In the same year, Salgado’s second book was published: “Sahel: Man in Distress,” on materials for which he worked in 1984-1985 in northern Africa in areas affected by severe drought. The photographs told of the courage and dedication of those who came to the aid of those in distress: young doctors and nurses from the Doctors Without Borders organization, engineers, workers, and service personnel; but of course the main focus is on the victims of drought and famine. “These faces, screaming piercingly without opening their lips, are no longer just “someone’s” faces,” wrote the famous Uruguayan journalist and writer Eduardo Galeano in the afterword to the book. And it’s really true - the heroes of Salgado’s photographs do not seem “alien” or “unfamiliar” at all.
From 1986 to 1992, the main subject of Sebastio Salgado's photographs was workers - fishermen, steelworkers, weavers, miners, construction workers, gold miners - doing hard physical work with their hands. Today they are already an archaeological rarity, found mainly in third world countries, and tomorrow, as a result of the automation of technological processes, they may be left without work and livelihood there too. The result of the photographer’s work was the photo album “” (“”) published in 1993. The book was published in eight languages with a circulation of more than one hundred thousand copies.
If during this project Sebastio Salgado photographed “only” in 23 countries, then while working on the next one he had to visit 47 countries. He dedicated this project to one of the most bleeding problems of our time - mass migrations. “I know about migration firsthand,” the photographer explained one of the reasons that prompted him to take on this work, “I was born on a Brazilian farm. At the age of five I began to live in a small town. At fifteen I left this city and moved to another - medium-sized with a population of 120 thousand people. This is where I met my future wife, Lélia DeLuise Huanique. 33 years ago (1967 - A.V.) we moved to live in Sao Paulo, then for political reasons we were forced to flee to France. Even today I am a foreigner living in a foreign country.”
The project took Salgado more than six years to complete. In 2000, two books about emigrants were published: “Migrations: Humanity in Transition” and “The Children: Refugees and Migrants”.
After the release of his first two albums, Sebastio Salgado became, without exaggeration, one of the most famous photojournalists in the world, and work on subsequent projects only strengthened his popularity. But more importantly, he showed himself to be a talented photographer. It may seem strange that the photographer himself considers his photographs to be the result of the work of a simple documentarian, believes that “It is not the one who photographs, but the photographed who makes the photograph.” “I don’t want my photographs to be looked at as works of art,” he says. All that remains is to rejoice in the fact that the future life of works of art does not depend on the will of the author. Salgado's photographs - astonishingly beautiful, despite the horror stories they tell - have long lived a life of their own in numerous exhibitions, in more than a hundred museums around the world, in private collections, in books and on electronic media.
In 1994, Salgado left Magnum Photos and, together with his wife, founded his own agency, Amazonas Images, probably the smallest photo agency in the world, consisting of just one photographer. The agency is engaged not only in photographic, but also in environmental protection activities. The couple bought land in Brazil on which Salgado’s father’s farm once stood and founded the “Instituto Terra” there, the main goal of which was forest protection and educational activities in this area. In 1998, they achieved the establishment of a nature reserve on these lands and began restoring the forest, because since the 1940s, the amount of green space has decreased by more than 300 times! And although complete restoration is still far away, in 10 years more than a million trees have been planted on the territory of the reserve.
The photographer’s next project, which many considered a radical change in activity, is related to environmental activities; the photographer himself considers this work a continuation of his previous research. Salgado decided to prove that there were places on earth unspoiled by civilization, to show everyone how beautiful they were. “I hope that this project will help humanity rethink its place in the environment. I called it Genesis because I want to go back as far as possible to the beginning of life on the planet: to the air, water and fire that gave birth to life; to those animals that do not want to be tamed and are still “wild”; to distant tribes, whose “primitive” life remained largely unchanged; to early forms of human settlement and organization."
He began work on the project in the Galapagos Islands, the same islands where Charles Darwin's ideas about evolution first occurred to him in 1835. Perhaps for the first time in his life, Salgado photographed sunrises and sunsets, birds and turtles, giant lizards or - as it sometimes seemed to him - small dinosaurs. Despite his age - by the beginning of the project he was already sixty, he was as happy as a child: “This is simply amazing! I even have a photograph of one iguana hugging another!” After returning from the islands, the photographer, of course, did not calm down: Kamchatka, Antarctica, Rwanda, Patagonia, his native Brazil were waiting for him... He gave himself at least eight years to complete the project, so it seems that the main discoveries are still ahead of him.
And I would like to hope that other projects will follow Genesis, because Salgado himself is full of optimism: “Photographers usually live until they are old,” he said in an interview in 2007, “And I hope that I can photograph until the very end. The pleasure I got from my first photographs has still not gone away. It's a great pleasure."
Sebastian Salgado is one of the world's most famous documentary photographers, a living classic of photography, one of according to PDN Magazine. Over the decades of his work, he created many outstanding photographs and forever entered the history of photography and photojournalism.
Sebastian Salgado was born in 1944 in a small Brazilian town. Neither in childhood nor in his youth did he even think about photography; at that time Sebastian had other hobbies.
In addition, he studied hard, eventually graduating from the Faculty of Economics of the University of Sao Paulo, after which he pursued a career no less persistently; but everything changed in 1970, when he was already 26 years old.
Through the World Bank, Sebastian ended up in Africa, and what was happening there amazed him so much that he took up the camera.
At first, he took amateur photographs and mastered the basics of photography, but already in 1973 he gave up his economic career forever and became a photo reporter.
And, as it turned out, it was in reportage and documentary photography that Sebastian Salgado found his true calling: already in 1979 he was invited to work at, perhaps, the most famous photo agency, Magnum. By the way, in 1994 he created his own agency Amazonas Images.
In the first years, Sebastian works on political reviews and news reports, but soon moves on to the main topic of his professional activity: social problems.
He relieves hunger and drought in Africa, poor neighborhoods in the cities of Latin America. In 1986, his first book, “The Other Americas,” was published, followed immediately by his second, “The Sahel: A Man in Trouble.” These two photo albums brought Sebastian Salgado world fame and recognition from his colleagues.
Then there were other projects: about the plight of workers, about the problems of international migration. In addition, Sebastian and his wife are actively involved in environmental activities and even founded the public organization Earth Institute in Brazil.
But no matter what Sebastian Salgado does, he still remains first and foremost a photographer, one of those who, with the help of photographs, shows people from different countries the world around them.
Includes 245 stunning photographs selected from thousands of images taken over eight years of travel to 32 different locations. The exhibition is a photographic expedition around the Earth, a journey to those places on the planet where its inhabitants have so far managed to avoid the destructive effects of modern civilization. This is evidence that there are still large regions on our planet where majestic nature reigns. “GENESIS” shares this beauty with viewers and draws their attention to what is still intact on the planet, what is already in danger of extinction, and what can still be saved.
“GENESIS” was started in 2004 and completed in 2011. Over the years of work on the project, Salgado visited the Kalahari Desert, the jungles of Indonesia, the Galapagos Islands, Madagascar, Alaska, Antarctica and other places where the beauty of untouched, pristine nature amazes with epic splendor and inspires to preserve it for future generations. Most of the photographs were taken in Russia - on the Kamchatka Peninsula and Wrangel Island.
Unlike the socially charged photographic projects that made Salgado famous (“Other Americas” 1986, “Workers” 1993, “Earth” 1997, “Migrations and Portraits” 2000, “Africa” 2007), “GENESIS” aestheticizes greatness planet Earth, 46% of whose territory still remains untouched.
The GENESIS project has already been seen by more than 3,000,000 spectators in 25 cities around the world, including in such institutions as:
Natural History Museum // London
Royal Ontario Museum // Toronto
Ara Pachis Museum // Rome
Botanical Garden // Rio de Janeiro
Fotografiska Photography Museum // Stockholm
European House of Photography // Paris
International Center of Photography // New York
National Museum of Singapore
Natural History Museum // Shanghai
Sebastio Salgado(b. 1944) - Brazilian photographer, photojournalist, together with Lelia Vanik Salgado, co-founder of the Amazonas Images agency in Paris, member of the prestigious Magnum Photo agency from 1979 to 1994. Salgado is the recipient of numerous awards for his contributions to photography, twice receiving the title “Photographer of the Year” from the International Center of Photography (ICP, New York). Since 2001, he has been a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was also awarded the Centenary Medal of the Royal Photographic Society.
The work of Sebastio Salgado became the material for the documentary film “Salt of the Earth”, shot in 2014 by the famous director Wim Wenders together with Salgado’s son, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado. The film was awarded a special prize at the Cannes Film Festival.
Sebastian Salgado(English) Sebastiao Salgado, R. 1944) is a Brazilian photographer working in the genre of social documentary photography.
Biography, creativity
Sebastian Salgado born February 8, 1944 in Aymores, Brazil. He received a master's degree in economics from the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil, after which he worked as an economist at the International Coffee Organization (ICO). As part of his work, Sebastian Salgado was forced to travel a lot, especially to African countries. I first started taking photographs during my many business trips. In 1973, Sebastian Salgado gave up his job as an economist and began devoting all his time to photography.
In the mid-70s (in his first creative years), Sebastian Salgado began working as a photojournalist and collaborated on an intermittent basis with agencies such as Gamma and Sigma. In 1979, he became a staff photographer at the international photo agency Magnum Photos. In 1994, Sebastian Salgado left Magnum and, together with his wife Lelia Wanick Salgado, founded his own photo agency, Amazonas Images, with its head office in Paris.
Together with his wife, Salgado has worked since 1990 to restore a small part of the Atlantic Forest in Brazil. In 1998, it was possible to turn this land into a nature reserve and create the Instituto Terra Foundation. The mission of the foundation is the restoration and conservation of forests, as well as environmental education of the population of Brazil.
In 2001, Sebastian Salgado became a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador.
In 2004-11 Sebastian Salgado worked on the "Genesis" project. The project is a series of photographs of “unsullied” places on the planet. The photographer captured landscapes of wild nature, as well as human communities that continue to live in accordance with their ancestral traditions and culture. Conceptually, Genesis is an attempt to chart a potential path toward the rediscovery of humanity itself in nature.
In 2014, a documentary film about the life and work of Sebastian Salgado, “The Salt of the Earth,” was released. The directors of this film were Wim Wenders and Juliano Salgado, the son of the photographer himself (Juliano Ribeiro Salgado). The film was awarded a special prize at the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for an Oscar 2015 in the Best Documentary category.
Sebastian Salgado works on most of his projects with his wife. In 1967, he married Leila Vanik Deluz (Salgado). The marriage produced two sons. The eldest son of Giuliano Salgado (b. 1974) is known as a director and writer. The youngest son, Rodrigo Salgado (b. 1979), was born with Down syndrome and lives with his parents.
Sebastian Salgado discovered the art of photography almost by accident. He once worked as an economist. And now he is considered one of the most successful and famous photographers on planet Earth. How did his fate turn out this way? How did he achieve his success? You can read about all this in the article.
Youth
Sebastian Salgado was born in 1944 in the small town of Aymores, where there were only sixteen thousand inhabitants. In those years, about seventy percent of the area of this region was occupied by forest, which is now considered the “lungs of the planet.” At that time, the territory of the Brazilian jungle was twice as large as, say, France. Now the area of this forest is only seven percent of its original size. When Sebastian was young, his hometown could only offer him primary school. Therefore, in order to study further, he was forced to leave it and go to Vitoria, the capital of the state of Espirito Santo. There he graduated from high school in 1962 and entered the university. After receiving his diploma in 1967, he married Lelia Deluyse Vanik.
Maturity
Sebastian Salgado soon became the father of two boys - Giuliano and Rodrigo. However, a big test awaited him. The youngest son turned out to have a terrible disease - Down syndrome. The family moved to Sao Paulo, where Sebastian received another master's degree in economics and his wife completed her musical education. She graduated from the conservatory as a pianist.
Then, in 1969, they moved to Europe, specifically to Paris. There Sebastian worked on his doctoral dissertation, and Lelia began studying to become an architect. In 1971, the family changed their place of residence again. Sebastian is invited to work as an economist for the International Coffee Organization. He travels extensively, participating in various missions sponsored by the World Bank. He visited Africa especially often. It was there that he began taking his first photographs.
New career
One day, returning to London from another trip, Sebastian Salgado realized that the photographs he had taken were drawing him in more and more. He even decided to abandon economics in order to devote his life to photography. Therefore, he and his wife returned to Paris, which they considered the only city suitable for this activity. At first he worked as a freelancer, but in 1974 Sebastian joined the Sigma agency. It sent him to Portugal, Angola and Mozambique, where the photographer gradually honed his art.
He then changed employers. The new agency - "Gamma" - gave him the opportunity to travel throughout almost all of Europe, Africa and Latin America. At this time, his wife completed her education and acquired the profession of urban planner. In 1977, Sebastian began working on a huge series of photographs dedicated to the life of Indians and peasants in Latin America.
Humanitarian missions
In 1979, the photographer changed his place of work again. He was hired by the Magnum Corporation, to which he devoted fifteen years of his life. At this time, he not only became famous for his reports from different countries and photographs published in the most prestigious magazines in the world, but also finally completed his epic about the life of ordinary people in the south of the American continent. Based on it, he published the first book in 1984. It was called “The Other Americas” and was released simultaneously in the USA, France and Spain.
This is how Sebastian Salgado, whose photographs made him a world celebrity, found his real path in life. He tried to talk about the situation of poor people and helped them, including by collaborating for two years with the humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders, recording terrible scenes on their behalf. He published two books under the general title “Sahel” - “Man in Despair" and "End of the Road", and also organized many photographic exhibitions. This is how he supported the work of Doctors Without Borders.
"Workers" and "Migrations"
From 1986 to 1992, Sebastian Salgado visited twenty-three countries to create a series of works about grueling manual labor. They were published in 1993 in the book "Workers". This work sold 100 thousand copies around the world, and an exhibition of photographs was held in more than 60 museums.
As a continuation of "Workers", the master begins the next series of photographs called "Migrations". This project took him to 43 countries. He traveled across all continents to show the fate of people forced to leave the countryside to move to cities. For example, he photographed nine megacities whose populations have grown dramatically in recent decades. His photographs from the series “Portraits of Children of Migration” were very popular. Based on these photographs, posters were made, new books were published, special educational programs were created, and exhibitions were seen by three million people.
But Sebastian Salgado, whose biography became the topic of our short study, could not have coped with all this without the help of his wife. It was she who was the main creative element in the entire popularization of her husband’s art. Therefore, in 1994 they decided to create their own business.
"Amazonaz Images"
Probably, this agency can be called the smallest in the world. But it was here that Sebastian Salgado and his wife were able to fully develop their activities dedicated to revealing the dark sides of modern society, the horrors of war, the suffering of poor and hungry people, far from the prosperous life of rich countries. The master can well be called the author of social photography. At the center of his art are noble faces, although often distorted by suffering. All his characters have a deep inner world, which is only emphasized by their competent and ability to play with light and shadow. Although some publicists accused him of aestheticizing pain, in fact Sebastian is simply trying to draw attention to problems that no one wants to see, in order to force him to solve the problems of that part of humanity that everyone has given up on for a long time.
"Genesis" and other projects
From 2004 to 2011, the photographer worked on a giant series of photographs called “Genesis.” In the Russian-speaking environment, the project is often called “Being”. This is probably the most ambitious work that Sebastian Salgado has done. Animals and people, wildlife and human communities, hostility and harmony, birth and death - everything is present in this amazing photographic story about traditional tribes and cultures that refused to follow the path of modern civilization and technological progress.
And in 2007, the artist created the “Coffee” project, where he demonstrated the cost of creating a popular drink on plantations in Brazil, India, Guatemala and other countries. Together with his wife, Sebastiano is trying to restore the lost Atlantic forest in his homeland. He created a special “Instituto Terra”, with the help of which he managed to turn this part of Brazil into a nature reserve. The photographer received many international awards and became a goodwill ambassador for UNICEF. Even in cinematography, Sebastian Salgado left his mark. The film about him “Salt of the Earth” (2014), which was also shot by the son of photographer Juliano Salgado, received an award at the Cannes Film Festival.