Sebastião Salgado: Capturing Humanity in Pictures
Sebastião Salgado was an artist, and he was a documentarian, capturing the plight of the downtrodden, but also their soul. Their beauty. He was criticized for this. They said he glorified poverty. He responded that the poor deserve just as good a picture as the rich. Probably even better. Sebastião Salgado was born February 8, 1944, in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. He trained as a Marxist economist. Joined the movement against Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1960s, and went into exile in France in August 1969 with his wife. “I arrived in France with Lélia, my wife, at the end of the 1960s as an exiled person, fleeing the system of deep repression that existed at the time in Brazil,” he posted on Instagram almost two years ago. “Soon afterwards, the Brazilian military dictatorship withdrew our passports and we had to file an injunction to get them back. We became refugees here in France, and then immigrants. When I did a piece of work on refugees and immigrants, I already k...
