Salgado: A look at the late photographer's legacy

"I write with the camera. Photos are my language." This, the artist said, was what motivated him. His photographs tell stories, as we can see in this picture, taken in 2005. It shows a group of Indigenous Waura fishing on Lake Piulaga on the upper Xingu River. The Waura live in the central Brazilian state of Mato Grosso.

In this composition from 2009, women of the Indigenous Zo'e tribe paint their bodies with ground seeds from the red fruit of the annatto tree, known in Brazil as urucum. The people of this tribe wear a white wooden peg through their lower lip. They lived in isolation until American missionaries made contact with them in 1987. The photos of the Zo'e and Waura form part of the project "Genesis."

In 2005, Salgado photographed an iceberg melting in the Antarctic. The photo was shown as part of the "Genesis" exhibition in Paris in 2013. Salgado repeatedly warned against the destruction of the planet. "A time will come when there is no space left on Earth for people," he said in an interview with DW in 2013. "We should exercise restraint and self-criticism."

Salgado traveled the world for eight years taking the photos for the "Genesis" project. They document the beauty of our planet in spite of environmental destruction and climate change — as here, with this elephant in the savanna. German filmmaker Wim Wenders worked with Salgado's son Juliano to convey this message in their 2014 documentary "The Salt of the Earth."

Director Wim Wenders (left) and Sebastiao Salgado choose photos to use in the documentary film "The Salt of the Earth," a portrayal of Salgado's life's work. "It was a declaration of love from the very beginning," according to Wenders. The film won the Special Jury Prize at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, and was nominated for the Oscar for best documentary.

After studying for a degree in economics, Salgado discovered his passion for photography in the 1970s while traveling in Africa as part of his work for the International Coffee Organization. He felt photographs described the continent better than texts and statistics. This picture shows women from the Mursi and Surma tribes in Ethiopia with their traditional lip plates.

Salgado documented the civil wars in Angola and Mozambique and the drought in Africa's the Sahel region. Between 1993 and 1999, he traveled to trouble spots around the world taking photos of people fleeing war, poverty and famine. In 2006 he published the photographs from the project — including this one — in a book entitled "Exodus." The pictures were exhibited again in Erfurt, Germany in 2017.

Like so many of Salgado's black-and-white photographs, this one, of the Grand Canyon in the United States, is almost like a painting. "Nothing in the world is in black and white," Salgado explained. "But by transforming the entire color palette into shades of gray and forgoing all color, I am able to focus on the essence of the photograph. That's why I look at things in black and white."

In 1986, Salgado managed to get permission from Brazil's military government to photograph the gold mines in the Serra Pelada region in the Amazonian state of Para. His photographs of gold miners, dreaming of riches but scarred by hardship and exploitation, went all around the world.

Salgado was the youngest of seven children. He died on May 23, 2025, at the age of 81. He was suffering from leukemia, due to complications from a malaria infection he contracted in 2010 on one of his many trips. But his photographs live on, as does his message.