[Sebastião Salgado (8 February 1944 – 23 May 2025) died in Paris at 81 from leukemia. For the Associated Press obituary by Mauricio Savarese, click here.

Salgado and I crossed paths only once, in the 1990s, at a ceremonial dinner in Gothenberg, Sweden hosted by the Hasselblad Foundation. I wrote about his work on a number of occasions, reviewing several books and several exhibitions for a variety of periodicals.

The following essay, a review of his 1991 exhibition “An Uncertain Grace” at the International Center of Photography in New York, first appeared in the New York Observer, May 20, 1991, under the headline “Statistics Come to Life in Ex-Economist’s Work.” I included it in my 1995 collection of essays, Critical Focus: Photography in the International Image Community. — A.D.C.]

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Sebastião Salgado: “An Uncertain Grace”

More and more photographers come to us through the filtration system of the academy. This is true even of photojournalists and documentarians, certainly including that cluster of self-proclaimed “reinventors of documentary” who sprang out of the University of California, San Diego in the mid-1970s and whose imagery has generally proven to be of interest only to other academics.

Sebastião Salgado, An Uncertain Grace (1991), cover

Nonetheless, it remains possible to become a major documentary photographer without seeking or receiving the art-academic imprimatur, and to produce socially effective work of substance without subscribing to the politically correct theories currently trendy in the olive groves. If evidence of this is required, one need look no further than Sebastião Salgado, a major survey of whose work, “An Uncertain Grace,” is presently on view at the International Center of Photography’s uptown branch.

Mr. Salgado is a 44-year-old politically-exiled Brazilian who — trained as an economist and without any background in photography — took up the camera while working for the International Coffee Organization in Africa in 1973. There could hardly be two more opposite, even contradictory disciplines; economics depersonalizes and generalizes, while photographs specify and particularize. Yet just as the insights afforded by economic theory can contextualize images of individual crisis, so those images can ground and give resonance to abstractions.

It’s hard to imagine anyone pursuing both disciplines simultaneously, and indeed, as Mr. Salgado recalls, “In a few months I dropped economics and I had a darkroom. Photography became an invasion in my life I couldn’t control.” Nonetheless, he has found a way of bringing it all back home, generating the images necessary to remind those who tend to think in numbers that real lives are at stake, that flesh and blood stands behind every statistic on famine, pestilence, poverty and death.

Mr. Salgado came to international prominence in 1981 with his photographs of John Hinckley’s attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan (he was observing Reagan’s “first 100 days” for the New York Times), but that spot coverage is entirely untypical of his work. Mr. Salgado is primarily concerned not with the movers and shakers, the rich and the famous, nor with unexpected, short-lived crises, but rather with the ongoing oppression and suffering of the poor and powerless, whose lives he addresses in self-assigned, long-term, carefully thought-out projects. These resolve into closely-edited photo-essays such as the astonishing account of workers in the Serra Perada gold mines in Brazil that appeared in the Times Magazine a year or so ago, and books like Other Americas and the volume that accompanies the present exhibition and shares its title.

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If there’s an obvious precursor to Mr. Salgado, it would be the late epic-poet-cum-photojournalist W. Eugene Smith. Surely it’s no accident that he’s been a recipient of the W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography. Like Smith, Mr. Salgado works in the extended form of the photo essay, and disdains no type of presentational vehicle, using the wall or the page, the original print or the reproduction, as the opportunity manifests itself.

Also like Smith, he brings to the situations he addresses a profound faith in the significance of the quotidian experience of the working class and the disenfranchised. Combining what Fred Ritchin (who, along with Sandra Phillips of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, co-curated this exhibition) calls a “stately lyricism” with an alertness to the drama embedded in the everydayness of hardscrabble subsistence, marginal survival and imminent death, what he gives us are impersonal statistics come — sometimes marvelously, sometimes terrifyingly, sometimes heartbreakingly — to vibrant life.

Sebastião Salgado, Other Americas (2015), cover

An underlying awe at the sheer vitality of people everywhere as they face the job of living and dying infuses this imagery. Not since Smith has anyone photographed manual labor with such deep respect and attentive admiration; but, whatever their occupation of the moment, Mr. Salgado approaches all his subjects with the eye of a sculptor, paying particular attention to the way he sets them in the space of the image, using the tactile potential of the photographic silver print to evoke their physicality.

Unlike Smith, however, Mr. Salgado does not single out and heroicize individuals as protagonists, following them at length over periods of time. If his vision is, like Smith’s, Homeric, it is the Homer of the Iliad rather than of the Odyssey he emulates, the bard who eschewed the private and introspective for the public and extroverted. The frieze-like gold mine images from Brazil exemplify this; the overall impression they convey is of a hive or anthill — undeniably composed of individuals, but ones whose individuality flares forth only briefly before the collective circumstance subsumes it once again.

Rather than seeking to persuade us that he, or we, can project ourselves into the psyches of his subjects, he proposes instead that a clear-eyed, empathetic description of their external appearances and visible circumstances can suffice; he does not ask us to imagine ourselves in their shoes, but merely to stand in their space and look unflinchingly at it, and them. Striking this difficult balance with remarkable consistency, he thereby embeds the people he photographs in the complexity of their situations, denying neither their autonomy nor the larger forces against which they struggle and to which they often succumb. For example, by the simple device of looking up rather than down at a nude, gaunt boy — little more than skin and bones — leaning on a walking stick, astride a sand dune, he avoids unnecessarily amplifying the pathos of this child’s desperate physical condition, and instead renders as quietly majestic his ferocious determination to live.

Sebastião Salgado, Gold: Serra Pelada Gold Mine (2019), cover

At a conference in Philadelphia last spring, Mr. Ritchin complained at length that museums were not sponsoring enough photojournalistic and documentary projects. One wonders what Mr. Salgado would have made of this bizarre lament, which is roughly analogous to holding mortuaries responsible for providing seminars on holistic health practices. As it happens, Mr. Salgado’s images are structured so richly and printed so finely (not by him personally, but under his close supervision) that they reward prolonged attention and “hold the wall” acceptably in the context of gallery or museum exhibitions such as this, where they frequently appear.

But, fundamentally, they’re meant to serve purposes only marginally compatible with those of repositories and showcases for fine art, made instead to be seen in ink versions on the printed page — hardly an enterprise for which museum patronage is either likely or appropriate, at least before the work has been generated and lived its life in the world. For that reason, the photographer works with the picture agency Magnum, and seeks his sponsorship from mass-circulation publications and such organizations as Medecins sans Frontieres (Doctors without Borders), a French relief group to whom he volunteered his services in the mid-’80s, during the famine in Ethiopia, Chad, Mali and the Sudan.

The more than 100 black & white images in this show, which occupies the entirety of the uptown facility, sample at length Mr. Salgado’s three major projects to date: his intimate, loving scrutiny of the rich diversity of peasant culture throughout Latin America (1977-84); the grim, painful report on mass starvation and migration during the droughts in the Sahel region of Africa (1984-85), 15 months in the making; and what he calls “the archaeology of industrialism,” an ongoing exploration of the disappearance of large-scale manual labor beneath the onslaught of high technology. (Not yet resolved, the last-named promises to be the most challenging he’s undertaken, if only because the photographer will have to resolve his obvious outrage at the economic exploitation of physical laborers throughout the Third World with his reverence for the skills they’ve developed and the crafts they practice.)

Individually powerful, these images collectively are very much of a piece, and clearly interrelated. All three of the essays are given ample breathing space here, and this exhibit’s only serious flaw is its failure to offer the audience any glimpse of the ways in which these images — most of which have already been widely published — utilize the printed page as a forum for visual persuasion.

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(Note: Subsequently I reviewed at length the Salgado project in progress mentioned above, Workers: An Archaeology of the Industrial Age. This appeared as “Economist-Turned-Photographer Eyes the World of Work” in the New York Observer, December 20, 1993.)

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