Sebastião Salgado, Tanzania, 1994

Sebastião Salgado (born in 1944)
Tanzania, 1994
Heliogravure by Pierre Brochet
signed in pencil by the author
Image: 25 x 37.5 cm; Sheet: 33 x 50 cm
Bibliography: Africa, Taschen editions, 2007
(tinted oak frame and museum glass)
First day of installation of the Benako camp following the Hutu massacres in Rwanda.

Sebastião Ribeiro Salgado was born in Aimorés, Brazil. After working as an economist at the Ministry of Finance in Sao Paulo, he joined the International Coffee Organization in London in 1971, for which he worked until 1973.

He decided to pursue a career as a photographer and was part of 1975 of the Gamma agency, which he left in 1979. On this date, he was elected to the international cooperative Magnum Photos, of which he was a member until 1994. Salgado covered the war in Angola and the Spanish Sahara, the taking Israeli hostages in Entebbe and the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan. In 1978, he reported on the City of 4,000 and the following year carried out work on transhumance and the living conditions of immigrants in Europe.

From 1977 to 1984, Salgado traveled throughout Latin America. The photographs taken during this journey were published in the book Autres Amériques, in 1986. He evokes both the persistence of peasant and Indian cultures, and the cultural resistance of the Indians of this continent. During the years 1984-1985, he traveled through the Sahel zone hit by drought and famine. His presence on site in the refugee camps allows him to bring back the images brought together in the book Sahel, Man in Distress. It shows the ordeal of the victims and the damage caused to their environment.

For six years, from 1986 to 1992, Salgado led a project devoted to the global production system which took him to twenty-six countries. The work will be published under the title The Hand of Man in 1993. The struggle led by the poor peasants of Brazil gave rise in 1997 to the publication of Terra. Between 1994 and 1999, Salgado carried out thirty-six reports on the question of the migration of civilian populations. In 2001, he followed and documented the global polio eradication campaign led by the WHO and UNICEF.

In 1994, Sebastião and his wife Lélia founded the Amazonas Images agency, a structure entirely dedicated to his work, and in 1998 the Terra institute, with the objective of replanting the Atlantic forest, which once existed in this country.

In 2016, Sebastião Salgado was officially installed in the photography section of the prestigious Académie des Beaux-Arts. He sits in the chair occupied by Lucien Clergue.