SEBASTIA
̃
O SALGADO
Brazilian
Sebastia ̃o Salgado is noted as the photographer of
modern human labor. Thus, he focuses on muddied
laborers dredging from the depths of the earth iron
ore that is shipped halfway around the world where
foundry men transform it into steel that then
moves on to another point of the globe where it is
molded into bicycles. His vision is macroeconomic;
his photographs, microeconomic. He embodies the
modern maxim, ‘‘Think globally, act locally,’’
which for the modern photographer might be bet-
ter expressed as ‘‘Focus wide, shoot close.’’
His native background, professional education,
and artistic insight have combined to provide him
with this unique and encompassing perspective. He
grew up on a farm where his father raised cattle, in
the municipality of Aimore ́s in the state of Minas
Gerais, a landlocked state in central Brazil with
great historical and cultural significance. In the
eighteenth century, Minas Gerais was the economic
center of the Portuguese empire. It provided the
major part of the world’s gold along with vast
quantities of diamonds and other precious and
semi-precious stones. The colony’s extraordinary
wealth made it a center of exceptional cultural
activity. It developed as a major yet remote center
of Baroque architecture, painting, sculpture, and
music in the New World. After the colonial period,
however, the state declined, left with haunting rem-
nants of its Baroque past and imbued with a tena-
cious sense of pride in its past glory.
Salgado grew up during a period of great mod-
ernist cultural ferment in Brazil. Significant de-
velopments in photography occurred with the
appearance of the first leading photo magazines,
CruzeiroandManchete,modeledonLife,Look,
andParis-Match. They were the primary vehicles
for the emergence of photojournalism in Brazil.
Photography as an art form also emerged, produc-
ing the first generations of its most noted practi-
tioners in Brazil, Jose ́ Oiticica Filho (1906–1964)
and Mario Cravo Neto (1947–).
Completing his secondary education locally, in
the early 1960s he became a university student in
Vito ́ria, the capital of Espı ́rito Santo, during one of
the most politically charged periods in modern
Brazilian history. A military coup occurred in
1964, establishing a regime that became progres-
sively more repressive, especially of university left-
ists and dissidents. Many of these were imprisoned
and tortured; others went into exile, as did Salgado,
especially to Paris, where they often studied the
social sciences. After doing graduate work in eco-
nomics at the University of Sa ̃o Paulo and Vander-
bilt University, Salgado began his professional
career as an economist with the Brazilian finance
ministry in 1968. At the same time, the reactionary
fury of the military regime was reaching its height.
Leaving Brazil again in 1969, Salgado studied
economics in Paris at the Sorbonne. It was at this
time that he became interested in photography. His
wife’s study of architecture required her to photo-
graph residences and interiors. This art so fasci-
nated him that he began to pursue it intensely as
a hobby, taking numerous portraits of his wife and
later of his children.
In 1973, he joined an agency of key importance to
the Brazilian economy, the International Coffee
Organization, in London. On assignment in Africa,
he began photographing scenes of the devastation of
drought in Ethiopia. He increasingly perceived that
as a photographer he could much more effectively
express his concern about the economic conditions
and role of people in the underdeveloped world.
More importantly, he felt he could convey not only
a sense of these people’s distress but of their dignity
and resilience and of their vital engagement with life.
His aesthetic development as a photographer was
strongly influenced by Henri Cartier-Bresson, who
maintained that a photographic image must catch
the balance of elements of a scene. The photogra-
pher must know the ‘‘decisive moment’’ to capture
this balance. The substance, however, of Salgado’s
photography was based on commitment to huma-
nist engagement as reflected in the work of W.
Eugene Smith and Walker Evans. The form of this
engagement was narrative photojournalism. In the
mid-1970s, he was associated with the Sygma
agency; he went on to Gamma and Magnum Pho-
tos, and in 1994 he founded his own Paris-based
agency, Amazonas Images.
From 1977 to 1984, he photographed in Mexico,
Peru, Ecuador, and Brazil. From 1984–1985, heSALGADO, SEBASTIA ̃O