Renowned Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado, who passed away on May 23, 2025, left behind profound reflections on humanity's relationship with nature and time during his final interview in February. The 81-year-old master of black-and-white photography, known for his monumental works documenting both human suffering and natural beauty, shared his philosophical insights just months before his death from leukemia complications related to malaria contracted during his extensive travels.
"I'm not the best photographer in the world, I'm the hardest-working," Salgado told writer Juan Villoro in a soft voice during their February 5 meeting at the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. Speaking in his nearly perfect Spanish enhanced by the melodious cadence of his Portuguese, he explained his unique perspective: "A photographer belongs to a breed apart: I'm not an artist; a journalist reconstructs reality, but a photographer doesn't. I have the privilege of looking, nothing more."
The interview took place during the opening of "Amazônia," the last large-format exhibition Salgado would present during his lifetime. Villoro, who had been working on a profile of the living photographer, found himself having to adjust verb tenses following Salgado's unexpected death. The photographer appeared in excellent health at the time, wearing his characteristic work clothes: baggy, waterproof pants with large side pockets, rubber-soled shoes, and a hiking vest.
Salgado's career spanned over five decades, during which he traveled enough to circumnavigate the globe several times. Born in the small town of Aimorés, Minas Gerais, in 1944, he was trained as an economist before leaving dictatorship-era Brazil in 1968 to work in London and Paris. His photography career began relatively late when, in 1973, he left his position at the International Coffee Organization to pursue his passion. He was nearly 30 when his wife, Lélia Wanick, lent him a camera, marking the beginning of a legendary career in analog photography.
Throughout his career, Salgado became known as a man of extremes who "ignored routine phrases and knew nothing of indifference." One of his recurring words was "colossal," and he had the authority of someone who witnessed 10,000 people die in Rwanda in a single day. His work captured the extremes of human condition: hell and paradise, fall and redemption. The 2014 documentary "The Salt of the Earth," directed by Wim Wenders and his son Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, captured his relentless pursuit of the perfect shot.
Despite being arguably the most famous photographer on the planet, Salgado faced mixed reviews throughout his career. Critics accused him of practicing an "aesthetic of misery" and "sentimental voyeurism," with some suggesting he beautified tragedy for commercial purposes. Ingrid Sischy criticized him in The New Yorker for the "beautification of tragedy," while Jean-François Chevrier in Le Monde accused him of "sentimental voyeurism." However, supporters like Eduardo Galeano defended him, writing: "Charity, vertical, humiliates. Solidarity, horizontal, helps. Salgado photographs from within, in solidarity."
Salgado responded to such criticism by defending his approach to photographing poverty: "Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Annie Leibovitz, the great American photographers who portrayed the rich in their country and who have worked on the great fashion shows, do not receive criticism because it is assumed that beauty belongs to the rich; but if you portray the beauty of the poor, there is criticism because it is assumed that someone poor has to be ugly and must live in an ugly place, but no: they live on our planet, which has a wonderful sky and incredible mountains; I must show that in the midst of their material poverty."
The photographer's relationship with controversy became particularly evident in 2025 when The Guardian published an article titled "Trouble in Paradise for Sebastião Salgado's Amazônia." The piece reported that anthropologist João Paulo Barreto, a member of the Tukano Indigenous community, left the Amazônia exhibition in Barcelona after 15 minutes, shocked by the display of nudity. However, the criticism was later refuted by Beto Vargas, an Indigenous leader of the Marubo group, who emphasized that the nude portrayals were authentic representations of how these communities live.
Salgado's most transformative period came in the late 1990s when he fell seriously ill after witnessing burning oil wells in the Kuwaiti desert and following displaced people in Africa. "I went to see a doctor because I felt so bad, and he told me: 'Sebastião, you're not sick, you're dying. If you continue like this, you won't be able to go on, because your body has entered a state of destruction,'" he recalled. This crisis led him to temporarily abandon photography and return to his family's farm in Brazil.
The farm, which had been completely eroded, became his salvation. Salgado decided to restore it, planting a tree for every photograph he had taken. By 2014, the previously barren land had flourished extraordinarily. "I saw the trees emerge and the insects return, and with the insects, the birds, and then the mammals. I was healed, regained great hope, and decided to return to photography," he explained.
When he returned to photography, it was with the epic "Genesis" project. Between 2004 and 2012, he embarked on 32 trips to document pristine nature around the world. "I wanted to see my planet, what was pristine about it, what hadn't been destroyed," he said. The project took him to Conservation International in Washington, where he discovered that 47% of the planet remained as it was at the moment of genesis – not the habitable parts, but the highest, wettest, coldest, most desert-like lands.
His work in the Amazon required unprecedented access and logistics. "There are no special planes to photograph the forest from above, nor are there drones because there are no bases to fly them," he explained. "I had to turn to the army, the only institution with representation in that territory, with 23 barracks. They agreed to let me travel in their planes, with the doors open for photography. These weren't missions put on for me; I joined the ones they had planned and contributed fuel (45,000 liters)."
During these Amazon expeditions, Salgado captured what he called "aerial rivers" – a relatively new scientific concept involving the massive evaporation from Amazon rivers and lakes. "The evaporation from the rivers and lakes of the Amazon is immense; it's the only area on the planet with its own evaporation that guarantees rainfall. This forms colossal clouds. The volume of water that emerges into the air is greater than the water that the Amazon River discharges into the Atlantic Ocean," he marveled.
Salgado's technical evolution paralleled his artistic journey. Having worked with Tri-X black-and-white film for most of his career, he eventually transitioned to digital photography. "All my life I've worked with Tri-X," he said, referring to the world's best-selling black-and-white film. "I knew it like the lines on my hand. It's the same with digital: I know my lights." This transition allowed him to work with the speed and volume his projects demanded, sometimes shooting 20 to 25 rolls of film per day.
Colleagues remembered Salgado as both demanding and generous. Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide, his closest friend in Mexico, recalled meeting him in 1980 when he sported a long blond beard and hippie appearance. "His mind and heart were more pristine then, open to surprises," she remembered. Pablo Ortiz Monasterio, founder of Luna Córnea magazine, was impressed by Salgado's work ethic: "It's mind-blowing to see him working under such great pressure; he traveled with a stack of 200 contacts that he reviewed at night."
In his final interview, Salgado reflected on the nature of time and human understanding with the wisdom of someone who had witnessed both the best and worst of humanity. "We live very short lives, 80, 90 years. If we lived thousands of years, we would think differently: we would understand the mountains," he mused. "But we pass through the world very quickly; it is necessary to make an effort to capture nature."
The photographer described a moment of transcendent beauty he shared with his wife Lélia during an Amazon helicopter flight: "I was busy photographing until I looked away and saw Lélia crying. I asked her what was wrong, and she said, 'It's beauty.' Paradise was all around." This encapsulated Salgado's lifelong mission to capture both the suffering and beauty of our world.
As he approached his 81st birthday, Salgado spoke of embarking on a "second journey" – reviewing his vast archive of over 600,000 postcard-sized photographs. "I photograph with the same intensity as I edit; I smell the smell of pork rinds in the mountains of Ecuador! In the photos of Mexico, I remember the tequilas I drank," he said, demonstrating how deeply sensory memory connected him to his work.
Salgado's death shortly after this interview gave his final words a testamentary quality, particularly his observation that "we pass through the world very quickly." His legacy, built from decades of captured moments spanning more than 100 countries, remains inscribed in our collective memory. As Victor Hugo once wrote to photographer Edmond Bacot, "I congratulate the Sun for having a collaborator like you" – words that could equally apply to Sebastião Salgado and his extraordinary collaboration with light, time, and human experience.
