Don McC

PHOTO

LEGENDS

“It is perhaps an odd thing for a Brazilian to admit, but I never drink

coffee,” confesses Sebastião Salgado. “And yet it runs through my

veins.” The famed photojournalist’s latest project chronicles the lives and

the locales of coffee producers around the world. This latest

portfolio is particularly personal to Salgado, and not just because his

homeland is the world’s biggest producer of coffee.

Salgado

on coffee

Sebastião Salgado’scoffee-table book has just latest

been published in English, and it’s all about coffee!

“MY EARLIESTcoffee. As the only boy among eight memor ies a re li n ked to

children, I would accompany my father in his truck to collect coffee beans for milling,

and would frequently stay over with young friends on coffee farms in the region,”

Salgado reminisces in his introduction to the 320-page book, The Scent of a Dream.

“Without noticing, I came to understand the numerous steps that turn a coffee cherry

into a cup of coffee.” But even when he became an economist

and moved to Europe, Salgado still couldn’t kick the coffee connection, writing his

doctoral thesis on the supply and demand for the commodity in Paris, and then taking

a job with the International Coffee Orga n i zat ion i n L ondon. It was here t hat he

began to take pictures on his travels of the world’s coffee growers with a camera

Coffee pickers at Finca La Hilda on the slopes of the Poás Volcano, San José region, Costa Rica, 2013 Photos © Sebastião Salgado/Amazonas Images

Sebastião _ Salgado _ Profile

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