How Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado made human suffering visible

In a 1990 interview with the British Journal of Photography, conducted by Amanda Hopkinson when his eponymous solo show opened at The Photographers’ Gallery in London, the journal wrote: “Salgado emerges as a photographer of conscience, dedicated to using images to highlight humanitarian and environmental issues.” That very year, his celebrated images were travelling to Mexico City, France, and Southern California. Besides his photographs, he leaves behind an infinitely growing forest of 2,000 acres in the Amazon, an ecologically rich expanse teeming with kaleidoscopically diverse flora, fauna, medicinal plants, birds, and wildlife. This dense, green legacy was the consequence and living embodiment of one of his final passions: Amazonia.

Chronicler of human tragedy

A Leftist-humanist, he realised this vision with his lifelong co-traveller and wife, Lélia Wanick Salgado, an architect who stood by him since 1967, ever since he fled his homeland Brazil, then repressed under a military dictatorship, and resettled in Paris in the late 1960s. In his early endeavours, he became a ‘defenseless’ protagonist among the emaciated mine workers in Brazil’s dehumanising Serra Pelada, an open-pit gold mine infamous for its vast scale of artisanal mining and the frenzied, often violent gold rush it attracted. A participant-anthropologist among the people — his camera, his notebook.

Since then, many of his black-and-white images have brought to life the myth of Sisyphus as a bitter and brutalising reality — the endless and mindless hard labour of the working classes. Their tragic faces distorted with infinite toil and grief; their thin legs and frail hands straining to carry the heavy sacks, day after day, hour after hour, trapped in an oppressive, shackled Sisyphean syndrome. Their bodies caked with dust and mud, their eyes, lips and faces barely visible, subsumed by the immensity of tragedy inside and outside those godforsaken mines of gold.

Every image tells an epic story of tragedy. Every photograph, whether of a solitary figure under a back-breaking burden or of thousands in never-ending and scattered lines of servitude, captures the ceaseless march up and down a Sisyphean hill in pursuit of illusory gold. Like ants or primitive creatures, telling the eternal tale of the barbarity inflicted by the rich and the powerful upon the poor.

These are the images that take him to the remotest conflict zones or to the most inaccessible margins — from Rwanda to Mozambique — with his Pentax camera in 1971. He understands them. His camera carries empathy, sensitivity, and nuance. His subjects are not victims; they are the hidden protagonists of a history of oppression, holding no collective tools of liberation in their hands. There is no book to save them. They are condemned.

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There is an ocean of invisible humanity he witnesses — perhaps from atop a dilapidated bridge — in one of his rare images of India: Churchgate Railway Station, Bombay. A sea of blurred bodies surges between two steam-engine trains, like tides crashing against rusted iron shores. The local trains, worn and weary, stand like mute spectators, sighing in stillness, and powerless amidst the daily deluge of human urgency.

The faces and bodies dissolve into motion — indistinct, unknowable, like ghosts of a million untold lives. No one knows the identity of the fellow traveller, perhaps not even their own, swallowed by the ceaseless churn of the city’s breathless routine. Every face, lost in motion, becomes one with the anonymous rhythm of Bombay’s unending rush. In this amorphous procession of toiling men and women, soaked in sweat under the oppressive humidity of the metropolis, people struggle first to reach the nearest street or bus stop before continuing their long, grinding journey on foot. Maybe to a dingy, stinking chawl with a shared, filthy toilet and no running water. A dark, one-room tenement with no electricity, not even a fan or a 40-watt bulb. A plastic roof in a slum. Or simply a spot on the street, under the night sky — like thousands of others who live without shelter, chasing a livelihood in the Maximum City of unfinished struggles.

An aesthete of misery?

In one of his photographs, an African woman walks with a little boy at her side and her two daughters ahead of her, their small figures moving through a vast, stark expanse that resembles a white desert — empty as a blank canvas. Her black dress floats and drags behind her, and the cloth that conceals her body becomes both a statement and a testimony to her impossible journey.

In yet another photo, a woman and her daughters, caught in the haze of a dusty evening, stand against a jagged horizon — like a crooked line on a hurriedly drawn map — their faces hidden in the darkness. The evening is like a white sky turning cloudy and that is the strange kind of redemption that the picture provides as backdrop. Her future appears as bleak as the frame itself — her posture stoic, her face steady, brave, and resilient, like that of the African woman fighting against all odds and resisting despair in the face of absolute adversity.

Elsewhere, rows of shackled legs of mine workers appear, with not even a ray of sunlight pouring in. Their undernourished muscles bulge, black as coal, their fetters glinting in abysmal moment of blackness as they trudge through the slush. Soiled faces of turbaned workers — lean, unyielding, almost angry — stare back. They are not reconciled to their fate, and yet their eyes seem to defy destiny itself, their spades held not as tools, but as weapons of the weak. This image could just as easily be from India. Shot in black and white — inky, grainy — each edge sharply etched.

Veronica Esposito writes in the British Journal of Photography (May 23, 2025): “Prints of Salgado’s work — always black and white, and generally printed at a dazzlingly high contrast — were as sizeable as his ambitious, landing as overwhelming presences in galleries and museums. He was known for blacks that were as inky as they come, and his landscapes also show a remarkable obsession with rays of light shining through rainclouds, around mountains and off water. He loved the graininess that came from film — so much so, that when he finally traded in his trusty Leica for a digital camera, he often digitally manipulated his images to bring in a grain reminiscent of real film.”

Salgado’s stint with the famous Magnum Photos began in 1979, and there was an apparent paradigm shift. His images moved towards documenting modernity — cities and societies which inhabit them. His images are like revelations, almost three decades of hard work on a complex and changing subject. He left Magnum in 1994. It liberated him and Lélia to pursue their own personal and ambitious projects. But the departure came at a cost. Within the tightly knit, often territorial world of documentary photography, many of his former colleagues viewed his exit as a betrayal.

The backlash grew sharper with Exodus, his first major project after the split, which drew intense criticism from peers. He was accused of being a ‘leftwing militant,’ of ‘exploiting and aestheticising misery,’ and later, of ‘violating pristine places and peoples.’ The judgments, Salgado felt, were laced with double standards. “I’ve seen wonderful photographs by Richard Avedon, Annie Leibovitz, and great European photographers,” Salgado told The Guardian last year when he turned 80. “There has never been criticism about the way they used light or the composition they created. But there has been about mine.”

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“They say I was an ‘aesthete of misery’ and tried to impose beauty on the poor world. But why should the poor world be uglier than the rich world? The light here is the same as there. The dignity here is the same as there. The flaw my critics have, I don’t. It’s the feeling of guilt. I was not born here [in Europe]. I came from the third world. When I was born, Brazil was a developing country. The pictures I took, I took from my side, from my world, from where I come,” Salgado told The Guardian.

The seer and the seen

In 2004, Salgado started his monumental project Genesis, exploring the primal textures of ecology across the Arctic and other terrains. Then came Amazonia — a nearly decade-long immersion into the immense, indecipherable expanse of the Amazon. It became the final fruition of his incredible life with the camera, shaped by his fears, angst, and love for humanity and the environment.

This was like stepping into a forbidden zone — a realm of sudden resurrections and revelations, inaccessible to ordinary people. It was the work of a dogged genius — relentless, singular, visionary. An untouched, sublime, pristine, primordial zone. The innermost womb of nature. In India, we call it shrishti — the original, imagined, and real womb of all ecology. Negotiating one of the most complex, dangerous, and disorienting landscapes on Earth — a terrain that could at once confuse and liberate —Genesis truly felt like a return to origins. It was the first beginning of the end of his “camera life.”

Then, he dared to enter another inaccessible zone — the sacred spaces of indigenous communities deep inside the Amazon. With large expeditions and his wife Lélia at his side, he ventured through impossible terrains teeming with snakes, scorpions, poisonous creatures, and invisible diseases. There, he documented the inherited wisdom, lived reality, and fragile essence of some of the world’s most isolated tribes — communities unsullied by the toxic cruelties or insatiable appetites of modern civilisations.

He lived with them, broke bread with them, listened to their stories, and framed their world through his lens. His wife was his companion and compass; the indigenous tribes, his guides, holding his hand, leading him into the dense, dark interiors where no photographer had ventured before, and where few would dare to follow. Not unless they carried a heart and soul as big, patient, and resolute as Salgado’s.

“What I most want my pictures to do is to lead to reflection and then action,” he told Amanda Hopkinson. “The revolution only comes through evolution.” And in another moment of reflection, he said, “When you take a portrait, the shot is not yours alone — the person offers it to you.” That offering, like light falling on the skin of history, was sacred to him. Every photograph was a shared breath between the seer and the seen. His photographs emerge from walking with the displaced, waiting with the forgotten, weeping with the unseen. Far from merely framing human suffering, he entered it and walked alongside it. Far from only illuminating darkness, he showed us how people glowed within it. And through his lens, the wounded world met its own gaze — unflinching, human, whole.