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 knew this story, in my own way I had lived it. For years, I had been looking for people who had been displaced from their place of origin and were in transit, looking for another point of stability. They left either for economic reasons, climate change or because of conflict. I realised a body of work called “Exodus”. In reality, I was photographing a part of my own life, portrayed in other people, some of them in slightly better situations than I had, and the vast majority in much worse conditions. It was a very important moment in my life, of identifying with these people, and of feeling deeply what I was photographing,” he wrote.

He first began taking pictures in the early 1970s with his wife’s Leica. By 1973, he had quit his job at the International Coffee Organization and became a freelance photographer. He traveled the world. Worked for several photography agencies. 

He was covering the first 100 days of Ronald Reagan in 1981, when he was one of the only photographers to capture the assassination attempt on Reagan’s life.

Salgado sold the pictures to finance his first major photography trip to Africa. 

Salgado’s projects would span the world. He would travel to 120 different countries on his photography trips. His pictures are big. Larger than life. Epic. Like the landscape photographer Ansel Adams’, but with grit. Portraying humanity…

The best and the worst.

And at their heart, revealing truth, struggle, the fight to survive, to exist. And the underpinnings of an unjust, unequal global system where so many have so little and so few have so much.

Like his 1986 pictures of the Serra Pelada Gold Mine, in Brazil. They seem like something from a dystopian future, or a long-forgotten past. Thousands of workers in shorts and t-shirts climbing through the mud on rickety ladders in near-slave conditions.

“He always had the idea that things are always going to get better, that we are on the path for development and somehow if he could create a warning, he could contribute to this process of social progress in society,” his son, filmmaker Juliano Salgado would later say.

Salgado shot masterpiece collections of pictures of workers. Of the fight for land and land reform. Of nature. The Amazon. Climate change. And when he visited communities, land occupations, or groups like Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement, he didn’t just drop in, shoot and leave, like news agencies photographers then and now. He stayed for days. He documented it. He experienced it. He lived it.

Sebastião Salgado’s photography spoke volumes, portraying deep and profound truth, shining light on the problems and the injustices of the world in exquisite images that one simply cannot ignore. 

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Sebastiao Salgado passed away on May 23, 2025, at the age of 81.

His legacy lives on. 

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Hi folks, thanks for listening. I’m your host Michael Fox. 

I have been a huge fan of Sebastiao Salgado for years. I’m happy I was able to do this short story on his tremendous life and work.

This is Stories of Resistance, a podcast series co-produced by The Real News and Global Exchange. Each week, I bring you stories of resistance and hope like this. Inspiration for dark times. If you like what you hear, please subscribe, like, share, comment or leave a review.

As always, you can find follow my reporting and support my work and this podcast at Patreon.com/mfox.

Thanks for listening. See you next time.

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This is episode 43 of Stories of Resistance—a podcast co-produced by The Real News and Global Exchange. Independent investigative journalism, supported by Global Exchange’s Human Rights in Action program. Each week, we’ll bring you stories of resistance like this. Inspiration for dark times.

If you like what you hear, please subscribe, like, share, comment, or leave a review. 

And please consider signing up for the Stories of Resistance podcast feed, either in Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Spreaker, or wherever you listen.

Visit patreon.com/mfox for exclusive pictures, to follow Michael Fox’s reporting and to support his work. 

Written and produced by Michael Fox. see more..