The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘My translator said: “They will kill us”’
Sebastião Salgado nearly quit photography after witnessing genocide – his wife showed him a way back
I ‘’m 80 years old and I work on projects that take six, seven or eight years to shoot,” says Sebastião Salgado. “If I start a story now, I probably cannot finish it, because I’ll be dead. We die. After 80, we don’t live too many more years.”
The great Brazilian photographer is talking to me from his studio in Paris. This year’s recipient of the Sony World Photography Awards’ Outstanding Contribution to Photography is still working today, and has even been experimenting with drones for the first time. But the epic works that made Salgado’s name, his images of men pouring into the earth in search of gold at the Serra Pelada mine in Brazil in 1986; the oil fields of Kuwait on fire after the Gulf War in 1991; or refugees fleeing famine in Africa in the 1980s and 1990s, are behind him. He’s been devoting his time to editing his vast photographic archive. The thing that amazes him is that revisiting these images transports him instantly to the moment each photograph was taken, from choosing its speed and aperture right down to the smells all around him.
“I’m feeling exactly what I felt in this moment,” he says. “It’s very powerful.” As he looked at his photographs from a trip to Ecuador, when he was ill but forced himself to carry on shooting, he felt the physical sensations return. “I was as sick as when I took the photograph.” And then he looked at what he shot in 1994: “How many times when I was editing my pictures that I photographed in Rwanda, the genocide and all the things that happened, was I crying over the contact sheets, so that my wife came and said, ‘Sebastião, come and sleep.’ But it was impossible for me to go to sleep,” he says. “I was still there.”
He and his wife, Lélia Wanick Salgado, have been married for nearly 60 years. The first photograph he ever took was of her, sitting on a windowsill in Paris in 1970, when they were students. She has been there all along, making it possible for him to begin a career as a photographer, organising the logistics of his intrepid voyages, chasing opportunities to sell his work, raising their sons Juliano and Rodrigo, who was born with Down’s syndrome, in the long periods when he was away shooting. “I can’t say where I end and where Lélia begins,” he said recently.
It was Lélia who gave Salgado hope to start again in the 2000s, when he was in despair. The horror of the Rwanda genocide, which he witnessed so soon after he had been in the former Yugoslavia, where ethnic tensions had spilt into massacres, almost ended Salgado’s career. What he saw made him feel that we no longer deserve to live, he told Wim Wenders in the 2014 biographical documentary The Salt of the Earth, co-directed with Juliano Salgado. “We humans are terrible animals,” he said. “In Europe, in Africa, in South America, everywhere. We are extremely violent. It’s an endless story… a tale of madness.” He could not countenance photographing any more of it.
I want to know if he ever felt afraid. Early in his career, Salgado was sent on an assignment to photograph the US president Ronald Reagan. He was on the scene when John Hinckley Jr tried to assassinate Reagan in Washington in 1981, and took a series of shots that were sent around the world. Does one have to overcome fear in those moments? “No, you are there to photograph, and you photograph,” he says, “you are inside the moment, and that is it. Photographers are not philosophers, they are not judges, they are not journalists. If they are not there, they cannot have the picture.”
He begins to tell me a story of when he was in Tanzania, heading to the border with Rwanda in a Jeep, “and I saw a group of guys come from the bush. I said, ‘Stop the car’, and I jump out with my translator, and I ask this group, where are you coming from? They say, ‘We have come from the River Akagera, not far from here, where they are killing a lot of Tutsis.’”
The men had crossed the river, the border between the two countries, by boat to escape the slaughter. They told him it wasn’t far, a seven-kilometre walk, so he and the translator set off.
“We arrived there,” he recalls, “the situation was dramatic, and I was photographing it. I saw a boat going back and forth across the river and I start to ask the guy if it was possible to go in the boat to the other side, because the story was happening on the other side. In a moment, this group of at least seven or eight men with machetes was around us. My translator said, ‘They are going to kill us.’” Their bodies would be thrown into the river where the crocodiles would ensure that no one ever found them.
“I said to the guys, ‘But why?’” “‘It is because you are French – the French are backing the Hutus against the Tutsis, while the Tutsis are dying.’ I said, ‘But I’m not French, I’m Brazilian.’”
They demanded to see his passport. “And then one of the guys went, ‘Brazil is the country of Pelé!’ And because of soccer, we began speaking and they became friendly. But if I had not had a Brazilian passport, we would have been killed.”
Sometimes, he says, “you are on the edge. In the war in Angola, three times I was on the edge of life and death. And I was not killed.
“I’m not a hero,” he adds. “I know when I’m very afraid because I have no more saliva in my mouth. It’s completely dry – I’m afraid. But I was there to do my pictures.”
Salgado has sometimes been criticised because his photographs retain a beauty, even when the reality they depict is unbearable. We talk about whether it feels wrong to take images of people in extreme states of suffering, in death or dying, as Salgado has done.
“For me, ethics is a very thin line,” he says. “At a few moments in my life, I have pictures that I do not make, I don’t press the button. I put my camera down.” In other moments, he says, “it was necessary to do them. Because I was there to show what was happening in front of my lens” – to capture things that would never happen again. “I never photographed with a bad conscience. I never went there to do ‘interesting pictures’. I was always looking for the beauty of the people. To see if I can, with my camera, show the dignity of the person in front of me.”
The most remarkable thing about Salgado is that he ever became a photographer at all. He was raised on a remote farm in Brazil, 500km north of Rio de Janeiro. “I came from a different world,” he says. It was eight hours by horse to the nearest village. They lived on the food they produced, and his parents “had the only radio in the region, and on Sundays all the farmers from around came to hear the radio”. Music was his point of contact with a world beyond, from the songs of Brazil’s north-east Atlantic coast to the music of the south where river systems connect Brazil with Paraguay. The poems in their lyrics “created a universe of images in my mind”.
To become an artist was never a possibility, but he recalls, “We rode horses all the time, and sang all the time – when you saw a jaguar, you made a song for the jaguar, when you saw a bird, you made a song for the bird.” It would be many, many years later when he would pick up a camera for the first time, but his creative impulse, he believes, was born on the farm.
His father sent him to study economics in the nearest large city, Vitória, where he and Lélia first met; they became involved in political resistance to the military dictatorship in Brazil, and left, for their own safety, for Paris in 1969, where Salgado worked towards a PhD and Lélia studied architecture. It was she who needed a camera for her studies; they bought “a nice Pentax” in Geneva in June 1970.
Salgado was 26 years old, and he says, “I had never looked through a camera viewfinder in my life.” But through it, he realised it was possible to “materialise” what he thought was beautiful, what was ugly, what made him happy, what made him unhappy. It became an obsession. Soon, he had his own camera, which he took on trips abroad for the World Bank; before long, he would decide to leave his well-paid career path and embark on a precarious new life as a professional photographer. Lélia helped to find him commissions, as Salgado’s talent, empathy and sense of drama (he shoots into the sun to create startling contrasts of light) blossomed in his photographs.
By 1979, he was working for the renowned Magnum agency, but already deeply engaged in his own Other Americas project, in which he
‘I know when I’m very afraid – there is no saliva in my mouth. It’s completely dry’
travelled around his native continent, photographing rural communities where, as he put it later, “dignity and poverty ride on the same horse”. It was years in the making and he followed it with vast studies of labourers and migrants. Gradually, he became drawn towards life at its most extreme: famine in Ethiopia and in the Sahel, where savannah meets the Sahara; war in the Balkans; his shattering experiences in Rwanda and Congo.
It was Lélia who showed him a new way forward when he was depleted in body and mind. The couple left Europe in 1999 and returned to the farm where Salgado had grown up. The overfarming of cattle and the chopping down of trees had worn out the land, reducing it from a verdant corner of the Atlantic Forest to arid hillsides. Lélia suggested they replant the trees, which they have been doing ever since, creating the Instituto Terra biological reserve. “We’ve planted more than three million trees,” Salgado says.
It inspired him to undertake a new project, photographing parts of the world where nature remains unspoilt. Genesis (2013) was shot over eight years between 2004-12, and Salgado followed it up with the photographic essay Amazonia (2021), which took him another nine years. He described former president Jair Bolsonaro as a bandit, for allowing widespread development of indigenous lands. “He was destroying an ecosystem that is essential for everything on this planet,” he says. Is his socialist successor, Lula, any better? “One of the first things he did was to create a ministry of indigenous people,” he says. “He put protection of the Amazon rainforest in place.” It won’t be easy, he says, suggesting we need “a Nato for the planet”.
Does he, once a supporter of the ALN guerrilla insurgency against the Brazilian military dictatorship in the 1960s, advocate violent resistance against climate change? He attended Cop26, in Glasgow, he says, and saw “CEOs arriving in their private jets. The only ones who were moving against that were the younger activists… their future is in danger.” He admires them, he says: “OK, sometimes it’s too much, but this is a very serious moment. They have a right.”