As part of the France-Brazil Year, Les Franciscaines in Deauville is hosting the work of Sebastião Salgado, one of the greatest figures in contemporary photography. Drawn from the collection of the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP), this unprecedented retrospective immerses us emotionally in the photographer’s past. Salgado himself describes having had “the enormous privilege” of exploring the world for over 35 years.
“Sebastião Salgado is not just a photographer; he is also a visionary—an activist. Beyond their beauty, his works stand out for their human dimension and profound reflection on the social and economic upheavals that transformed the 20th-century world,” says Philippe Augier, Mayor of Deauville and President of Les Franciscaines.
A former Brazilian economist who later became a naturalized French citizen, Sebastião Salgado began traveling in 1973 to bear witness to and capture, through his lens, what moved him most deeply: life. His social photography is based on extensive documentary research, supported by his wife, Lélia Wanick Salgado, his work partner from day one.
The exhibition opens with one of his first personal projects, Other Americas (1977–1984), in which the photographer explores the soul of Latin America, his home continent. It is here that he forged his signature style, blending compositional perfection with mastery of black and white.
The exhibition continues with large excerpts from his two most significant photographic series: Workers: An Archaeology of the Industrial Age (1986–1992) and Exodus (1994–1999). For the first, Sebastião Salgado traveled to 35 countries in search of vanishing industries still employing manual laborers. The second project led him deep into mass population movements: rural exodus, economic migration, and, above all, refugees fleeing the world’s most devastating conflicts. Five years of documenting these crises left an indelible mark on him, culminating in a breaking point—the 1994 Rwandan genocide, in which Salgado says he was completely “immersed.” The accumulation of death and violence ultimately pushed him into a profound period of despair. “A photographer, if he’s not there, doesn’t get the image. We expose ourselves a lot.”
At that time, to heal, Sebastião Salgado decided to put down his camera and returned to Brazil to reconnect with his roots. Together with Lélia, he founded Instituto Terra in 1998 and threw himself into an ambitious project: the reforestation of the land surrounding his childhood farm and, more broadly, the entire Rio Doce Valley in Brazil. More than 25 years later, their ecological program is one of the country’s most significant, with 3.4 million trees planted and 1,350 people involved. This resurgence of life rekindled Salgado’s passion for photography—not to document human suffering this time, but to capture the beauty of the wildlife and landscapes of our planet.
In the early 2000s, he embarked on a new project, Genesis (2004–2012), for which he explored the farthest reaches of the world, from the Galápagos to the Amazon, passing through Africa and the Arctic.
The exhibition concludes with an ode to the last untouched regions of our planet, where nature still reigns in all its majesty, far from human chaos. “We have destroyed much of our biodiversity, but 46% of our planet—nearly half—still lives as it did in the time of Genesis,” Salgado reminds us, his eyes shining. “If we disappear—and we will disappear, because we are programmed to end—the planet will fully regenerate itself. The planet has colossal wisdom. I am not religious, but I believe in Evolution.”
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