In Memory of Sebastião Salgado (1944–2025)
Mahacaraka® Press
A lens that bore witness to humanity’s soul.
We at Mahacaraka® mark with profound sorrow the passing of Sebastião Salgado — a photographer, a humanist, a tireless traveller of the human condition. Across five decades, he gave voice to the voiceless through images that transcended borders and languages. His passing is not just the loss of an artist, but of a conscience — one that illuminated the world’s forgotten corners with patience, dignity, and unflinching truth.
Born in Aimorés, Brazil in 1944, Salgado’s path to photography was far from linear. Trained as an economist, he earned a doctorate from the University of Paris and worked for the International Coffee Organisation. It was only in the early 1970s, while on assignment in Africa, that he took up a borrowed Leica. That moment redirected the arc of his life. What followed was not a career, but a lifelong pilgrimage.
In 1979, Salgado joined Magnum Photos — a collective that valued the slow, immersive ethics of storytelling. His seminal project Workers (1993) was a global tribute to manual labour in the waning age of industrialisation — from coal mines in Eastern Europe to oil fields in Kuwait. It was followed by Migrations (2000), a staggering body of work capturing the displacements and upheavals of global humanity. These were not images of tragedy; they were monuments to endurance.
Then came Genesis (2013), a project that took him to over 30 countries across eight years — from the icy vastness of Antarctica to the untouched tribes of the Amazon — in search of pristine environments and ancestral ways of life. It was his most poetic rebellion: a reverent call to reconnect with the Earth before it was too late.
Yet his impact extended beyond imagery. Alongside his wife, Lélia Wanick Salgado, he reforested a portion of Brazil’s Atlantic Forest — planting over two million trees and founding the Instituto Terra, a model for ecological restoration. In doing so, he turned a life shaped by bearing witness to human suffering into a legacy rooted in healing.
Salgado received countless honours, including the Royal Photographic Society's Centenary Medal and UNESCO's Goodwill Ambassador title. But it was never awards that defined him — it was the way he carried his camera like a question, not a weapon.
At Mahacaraka®, we remember Sebastião Salgado not only for the gravity of his lens, but for the ethics he lived by — to photograph with humility, to journey with intention, and to illuminate without exploiting. His work taught us that the soul of a photograph lies not in what is seen, but in what is felt.
He leaves behind more than images. He leaves us with a way of seeing.
Rest in light, Maestro.
