Sebastião Salgado passed away on Friday. Today’s edition is dedicated to him. It will be in free access for all until the end of the week.
The Académie des beaux-arts published the following announcement.
The permanent secretary, Laurent Petitgirard, and the members and correspondents of the Académie des beaux-arts are very sad to announce the death of their colleague Sebastião Salgado at the age of 81.
Sebastião Salgado was born on February 8, 1944, in Aimorés, Minas Gerais, Brazil. An economist by training, he began his career as a professional photographer in 1973 in Paris. He worked for the Sygma, Gamma, and Magnum agencies until 1994, when he and his wife, Lélia Wanick Salgado, founded an agency exclusively dedicated to his work, Amazonas Images. Sebastião Salgado has traveled to more than 100 countries for his photographic work, particularly for his long-term projects, which, in addition to numerous publications in the international press, have been featured in books such as Other Americas (1986), Sahel, l’homme en détresse (1986), Workers(2005), Terra (2001), Exodus (2000) and The Children (2005), Africa (2007), Genesis (2013), The Scent of a dream, Travels in the World of Coffee (2015), Kuwait, A Desert on Fire (2016) and Gold (2019). Traveling exhibitions of these works have been and continue to be presented to this day in major museums and galleries on every continent. His exhibition “Salgado Amazônia,” designed by his wife Lélia Wanick Salgado, featured more than 200 works at the Philharmonie de Paris in 2021. As part of the Year of Brazil, the exhibition “Sebastião Salgado. Collection de la MEP” is currently on display at the Franciscaines in Deauville.
Several works on the photographer’s life and career have been published, such as From My Land to the Earth(2022), a story told through the pen of Isabelle Francq, and in 2014 the documentary film The Salt of The Earth, co-directed by his son Juliano Ribeiro Salgado and Wim Wenders, which presents his life and work.
A UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador since 2001, Sebastião Salgado has received numerous awards, including being elected an Honorary Member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences in the United States in 1992 and a Commander of Arts and Letters in 2014, before being made a Knight of the Legion of Honor France in 2016. In 2019, he was elected an Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (United States) and received the German Booksellers Peace Prize. In 2021, he was awarded the Praemium Imperiale Prize.
Sebastião Salgado and Lélia had been working since the 1990s to restore the environment in part of the Atlantic Forest in Brazil’s Minas Gerais state. They returned a plot of land they owned to nature, which became a nature reserve in 1998. That same year, they founded InstitutoTerra, whose mission is reforestation and environmental education.
A great witness to the human condition and the state of the planet, Sebastião Salgado conceived photography as “a powerful language to try to establish better relationships between humans and nature.” He always worked almost exclusively in black and white, which he considered both an interpretation of reality and a way of expressing the irreducible dignity of humanity.
Sebastião Salgado was elected to the french Academy of Fine Arts on April 13, 2016, to the seat previously occupied by Lucien Clergue (1934-2014). He was the father of two sons, Juliano and Rodrigo, and grandfather of Flavio and Nara.
“Extremely devoted to the Academy of Fine Arts, Sebastião Salgado attended our weekly sessions assiduously and participated passionately in the juries of the awards, as well as in the organization of photography exhibitions for the Academy of Fine Arts’ laureates. I salute the memory of a man exceptional for his moral qualities, his charisma, and his commitment to art. He leaves us a masterful body of work. On behalf of the Academy of Fine Arts, I extend my sincere condolences to his wife, Lélia, and his children.”
Laurent Petitgirard
