Brazilian documentary photographer and photojournalist based in Paris. Started his professional life as an economist, with an MA in economics from the University of São Paulo. He was pursuing a Ph.D. in agricultural economics at the University of Paris when his job for London-based International Coffee Organization brought him to Africa for the first time. He started shooting photographs and, in 1973, switched careers to become a professional photographer. In 1974 he joined the Sygma photography agency, soon transferring to Gamma (1975–79). During these years he worked as a photojournalist, primarily on news assignments, traveling extensively in Africa, Europe and Latin America. In 1979 he became a member of the cooperative MAGNUM. He left the agency in 1994 to work independently with Amazonas Images, led by his wife Lélia Wanick Salgado, who designed many of his books.
Working in both black-and-white and color, Salgado followed a tradition of socially concerned photography. With his visually striking compositions, he is considered one of the foremost contemporary photographers, though he also received criticisms of over-aestheticization and sentimentalization. His work earned him numerous photojournalistic awards such as the W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography. Twice he was named Photographer of the Year by the International Center of Photography, New York.
Just as most of his work was focused on the gulf between the haves and the have-nots, Salgado was eager to collaborate with humanitarian organizations, including Doctors Without Borders in Sahel, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees, Global Polio Eradication Initiative, World Health Organization and Amnesty International. He was a UNICEF (The United Nations Children’s Fund) Goodwill Ambassador and an honorary member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences in the United States.
SOURCE: Denise Carvalho. "Salgado, Sebastião." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press. Web. 21 Oct. 2016.
Sebastiao Salgado's work is not for the faint of heart. His photographs deliberately provoke and disrupt; they are not easy to look at because they are not supposed to be easy to look at. With a clever combination of distance and intimacy, Salgado personalizes human suffering. We are accustomed to hear ing the numbers—10 people killed in a car bombing, hundreds dead in mud slides, entire villages ravaged by food shortages—but Salgado forces us to see the people, the wrinkled skin of poverty, the bent shapes of hard labor. His pictures are often disturbing because to personalize suffering is to make it hor ribly banal: isolation, poverty, exploitation, marginalization, and even geno cide are part of everyday life in most of the modern world. These subjects are not easy to look at, Salgado argues, because those of us looking usually go to such lengths not to see them.
SOURCE: Wolford, Wendy. "Making a Difference: Sebastião Salgado and the Social Life of Mobilization."Sociological Forum 26, no. 2 (2011): 444-50. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23027330.
