Audio Guide - Sebastião Salgado

Introduction

Hello and welcome to Fotografiska. My name is Natacha and I will be your tour guide today for this fantastic retrospective of the work of Sebastião Salgado, one of the most important photographers in the world. Originally, he had planned to be in Shanghai for the opening – but unfortunately, fate decided otherwise and he passed away earlier this year.

This exhibition is a tribute to one of the masters of photography, but also a tribute to the man who – throughout his life – continued to explore – sometimes at a danger to himself – the most remote and dangerous places on the planet.

Sebastião Salgado's early influences included Lewis Hine, W. Eugene Smith for long-term documentary projects, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa for humanist photography, Ansel Adams for his majestic landscapes, which inspired Genesis, and Walker Evans. Yet he developed a unique style over his whole career which you will now discover.

His life as a photographer had two phases: The first phase was when he decided to quit his carreer as a development economist to become a full time photographer when he was in his late twenties. He joined the Gama and then the Magnum press agencies as a reporter, giving him the opportunity to travel the world. At the same time as he was covering the news, often in color, he embarked in long series – very much like another famous photographer, Eugene Smith, had done 50 years earlier.

These are the works that are presented here: The other America, The Scent of a Dream, Migration, Workers, Sahel.

These series took him to many of the most difficult places on earth, witnessing incredible hardships so much so that, in 1996, he could not take it any more and became seriously sick. He stopped shooting for a while until he reconnected with photography with his last series, Genesis, which starts our exhibition.

The Genesis project took Salgado around 32 countries and lasted for 8 years. Genesis is Sebastião Salgado’s photographic tribute to the planet’s remaining untouched places. The idea for Genesis took shape in 2002, when Salgado and his wife and collaborator, Lélia Wanick Salgado, learned that nearly 46% of the Earth’s surface is still preserved—despite the destruction of nearly half of the planet by human activity. During the whole project, Salgado was looking for places that seemed as untouched and ethereal as his homeland in Brazil, where his childhood took place, which in his memory was like a paradise place before the deforestation. They called the project genesis in reference to the volcanic eruptions and earthquakes that shaped the Earth; to the air, water, and fire that gave birth to life; to the oldest animal species that still resist domestication; to the remote tribes whose lives are largely unchanged; and to the extant early forms of human organization. They wanted to examine how humanity and nature have long existed in what we now call ecological balance.Much like his heroes, Salgado developed a style in black and white that found beauty in brutal subjects of poverty, hardship, and oppression of various cultures under the wake of industrialization of the native landscape.

Shooting this series must have been extraordinarily difficult—yet Salgado’s process reveals just as much about his work as his photographs do. A modern-day adventurer, he trekked on foot into remote areas well into his 60s and 70s, hauling 30kg of films and cameras. Each expedition demanded meticulous preparation, drawing on his early training as a development economist: he’d spend months building local contacts who could facilitate access. It was calculated exploration—where his economist’s mind and artist’s eye merged to document humanity’s raw edges.

In April 2011, Sebastião Salgado joined the Nenets, a nomadic reindeer herding group in Siberia near the Arctic Circle. They move with their herds—sometimes around 6,000 reindeer—across freezing temperatures, down to –40°C. Every day, they travel up to 50 kilometers, crossing frozen rivers and living in tents made from reindeer hides that they pack up and move constantly. Women drive the big sleds, men ride smaller, faster ones. Their ability to live in such conditions is bolstered by a shamanistic and animalistic belief system that stresses respect for the land and its resources.

For Salgado, photographing in this white, flat landscape was tough, especially in black and white, because the low light made it hard to get contrast. But he prefers black and white—it strips away distraction. It allows the viewer to focus on expression, presence, and gesture. Thus, black and white invites a deeper connection. For Salgado, it was the most powerful way to capture the essence of nature—its strength, its personality, and its dignity.

Black-and-white film had another advantage - you could overexpose and still fix the image in the darkroom until it matched what you felt when taking the shot. Color film allowed no such flexibility. Digital cameras automatically recorded each photo's time. But something essential was lost: the darkroom's alchemy where Salgado physically relived each moment. Printing his images, particularly those vast white landscapes, became an immersive experience. The white tones burned onto paper just as they had imprinted on his memory - an immaculate, almost mystical reconnection with light, with time itself suspended. No digital file could ever replicate this sacred ritual. Even when Salgado eventually switched to digital for practical reasons - the equipment was lighter to carry and also much easier to pass controls at airport – which can be so damaging for films - Salgado remained deeply connected to film photography.'The contact sheet is an absolutely essential part of my work,' he explained. 'In fact, I’ve kept every single one of them—all my sequences, all my black-and-white prints—for over forty years.

For this photograph, Salgado and his crew worked first from the air, then from the water, eventually embarking on an eight-day journey covering 280 miles (450 km) down the Colorado River. But the image is more than just a grand landscape. It captures the confluence of the Colorado and Little Colorado Rivers, seen from Navajo territory. Just beyond this junction begins the Grand Canyon National Park.

Beneath the monumental beauty lies a deeper tension: this land is sacred to the Navajo people, or Diné, whose ancestral territory extends throughout the region. It is a landscape marked by a painful history — one of forced displacement, resistance, and survival — including the Long Walk of the 1860s, when thousands of Navajo were exiled by the U.S. government. Today, the Navajo Nation remains the largest Native American reservation in the United States.

Like Salgado’s tonal mastery in black and white, Zeng Han’s Meta Sanshui: Echo of Shansui presented in the Geomancy exhibition following Salgado's,employs subtle gradations of gray to create a dialogue between ancient Chinese painting aesthetics and contemporary photographic technology. Both photographers reveal how technology can transform—but never fully contain—a landscape’s spiritual and historical weight. Where Salgado’s lens exposes colonial scars, Zeng’s pixel-perfect frames question modernity’s gaze on mythic terrain.

As part of his Genesis project, Sebastião Salgado embarked on a journey to Antarctica—twice the size of Australia and the driest, windiest, coldest continent on Earth. He sailed from Ushuaia, at the southern tip of Argentina, past Cape Horn and the remote Diego Ramírez Islands, then across the Southern Ocean to the Antarctic.

In some areas between Paulet Islands and the South Shetland Islands, snow melts during summer. On the mainland, Salgado and his crew were warned about the dangers of hidden crevasses in the ice and glaciers. Weather could shift suddenly, making things even riskier. Their 120-foot boat was designed so that it would rise above rather than be crushed by ice, but they were still trapped for three days before the wind changed and the ice park moved away. Sailing to the Weddell sea was particularly hazardous because of the number of icebergs, some barely visible, other almost alarmingly large. One in particular stood out: it had a huge cube of ice on top, so striking they nicknamed it "the Cathedral." Listen around you - the sound of icebergs cracking and groaning. As for “the Cathedral” its fate remains unknown: is it still here today?

Have you noticed Salgado's masterful work with curves? Nature is hardly ever made out of straight lines. The whole of Genesis seems to be celebrating curved shapes, echoing the penguins path follows the glacier's grand curvatures, the penguins’ highway, the whale's arched tail above water, then the seals' coiled bodies, and finally the Brooks Range's undulating peaks in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: a visual symphony of Earth's organic geometry. Curiously enough, the only shape made of rectangle is the cathedral, which looks like a man made castle. This contrast makes this ephemeral sculpture all the more spectacular.

Deception Island, a volcanic island at the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, is home to one of the world's most concentrated colonies of penguins - gentoo penguins, adelie penguins and, most famously, chinstrap penguins with that black line under their chins turning them into tiny police officers. The island is deceptive in various ways. Swirling mists obscure the view and, despite the freezing temperature, you just need to dig a pit in the sand for a bath in the hot springs - the last volcanic eruptions took place in 1992.

As Salgado walked 7km towards the colony, he heard the penguins shriek, he smelled a fishy odor, but he could see nothing. "Then, - he said, we crossed from the fog. Oh boy! The sight of 500,000 penguins. Of all the animals I have seen, they are the closest to humans." He recognised their formality, their organization, as there is a "penguin highway", with penguins waddling downhill in one lane and uphill in the other, their relentless hard work fishing for their young and travelling with stones in their mouth to build homes.What most struck Salgado was how closely they resembled the Brazilian gold miners featured in the photographs that first made his name. "It was like an incredible human movement, the Serra Pelada of penguins. It could have been the town of Lilliput."

Salgado describes his jouney on the boat on Valdes Peninsula on Argentina’s Atlantic coast as one of the most poignant experiences of his life. The southern right whale migrates to the Antarctic during the summer, then heads north to breed. One of the largest breeding grounds is off the Valdes Peninsula on Argentina’s Atlantic coast, shaped like a crab with two sheltered gulfs.Salgado recalls that while he was waiting for the best light to photograph, 50 foot whales and their young played around them, sometimes coming so close that they could have stroked them. He describes the 40 ton animal leaping into the sky and then crashing back into water as one of nature’s grandest spectacles.

Drawn to the Valdés Peninsula because of the shelter provided by its two gulfs, the Golfo San José, and the Guolfo Nuevo, often navigate with their tails upright in the water. When a tail stands immobile for ten minutes, it is probable that the whale is completely vertical in the water, in a kind of resting position; it has also been claimed that the whales use their tails as a sail, allowing the wind to do the work. After close observation, it is possible to predict when a whale will jump: a sudden and swift movement of the tail provides the bust of energy that enables the whale to project its massive body out of the water.

This photograph was taken in the eastern part of the Brooks Range, which rises to 3,000 meters. This rugged stretch of mountains is sliced by deep river valleys and numerous glaciers. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, in northeastern Alaska, is the largest wildlife refuge in the United States, covering no fewer than six ecozones and stretching some 300 km from north to south, sometimes rising to almost 10,000 feet. Along its northern coast, barrier islands, coastal lagoons, salt marshes, and river deltas create a vital habitat for migratory birds. Caribou find summer refuge here from insects, while Arctic bears hunt seals and breed on the coastal ice during winter.

What makes this landscape truly unique is its light. In this region, the weather fights fiercely: cold Arctic air clashes with warm southern winds, creating dramatic skies where snow, rain, and sunshine merge in a spectacular battle of light. Salgado says in his biography this sky reminds him of his childhood in Brazil. He remembers sitting under trees to protect his fair skin — they had no sunscreen then — and always seeing his father approach, backlit by the sun. This is how those lights entered his photographs. As he says in his biography, “Those lights and spaces are my history.”

Salgado’s skies are more than backdrops—they’re protagonists, and they shape the emotional weight of each landscape. In South Georgia, a brooding, iron-gray expanse looms behind elephant seals, its storm-charged clouds turning the scene dystopian. From Siberia’s divine white heavens to Arizona’s fractured cloudscapes imitating Colorado canyons, he treats the sky as a vast, living canvas, revealing it as Earth’s living mirror, always in dialogue with the terrain it embraces. Here, the dialogue between sky and earth becomes spectacular—a single sunbeam pierces through the clouds, descending like a celestial bridge onto the tundra of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

This tender image of elephant seal calves lounging on the shores of South Georgia Island captures the playful innocence of young wildlife. South Georgia is one of the most biodiverse places in the Southern Ocean. Home to vast colonies of giant albatross, royal and macaroni penguins, Antarctic cormorants, and southern giant petrels, the island is a sanctuary for countless species. Alongside native sea lions and elephant seals, it even hosts reindeer—introduced by Norwegian whalers over a century ago.

Behind the elephant seals, you can see penguins—likely gentoos with their fluffy and soft down, and those unmistakable chinstraps, their black 'helmet straps' making them look like tiny police officers.

If you look closely... in the seal’s eye, you can see Salgado reflected—like a Renaissance painter who included himself in the canvas. Like Van Eyck in The Arnolfini Portrait—where the convex mirror reveals the painter’s tiny reflection at work—Salgado subtly inserts himself into his subject, becoming both witness and participant in the scene.

When Salgado saw the iguana during his first visit on the Galapagos Island, he was struck by how its scales resembled medieval chainmail armor —and how its fingers looked almost human. A photograph of the marine iguana’s claw, taken in the Galapagos, very land that inspired Darwin’s theory of evolution, illustrates how all species are connected, each evolving differently from a common origin. The Galapagos islands are isolated, predator-free and protected; which offer ideal conditions for the development and survival of endemic flora and fauna. As a result, the Galápagos provide the perfect home for rare and unique species found nowhere else. The Galápagos also taught Salgado an important lesson about photography. Struggling to photograph animals that constantly fled, he eventually realized that by imitating their behavior—crouching down and moving slowly on his hands and knees—they began to accept his presence. Gradually, the animals approached him and finally allowed themselves to be seen and photographed.

Salgado spent three months in the Upper Xingu region of Brazil, where he lived among several Indigenous groups, including the Wauras —a community of just 320 people. Yet within this number lies an entire civilization: a self-sustaining universe of language, cosmology, and ancestral knowledge that has sculpted the Amazon for millennia. Despite being connected to the modern world through solar-powered radios and access to emergency healthcare, they continued to live closely tied to nature and followed a rich calendar of rituals. One of the most unforgettable experiences for Salgado was joining the Wauras for the kuarup, a traditional funeral ceremony, hosting around 1,000 guests.The ceremony became a rare crossroads of civilizations—as neighboring Indigenous groups gathered, they exchanged ritual objects, dances and ancestral knowledge. In preparation for this major event, the entire tribe — men, women, and children — set off on a two-week fishing expedition. They traveled together in wooden canoes across the lagoon. At the fishing site, the Wauras built raised fire tables, where freshly caught fish were immediately smoked to preserve them. The fish was then wrapped in thick leaves into 30-kilo bundles. Once they had enough, they returned to the village. There, the women had already prepared a large supply of manioc flour, the staple of their diet, extracted from cassava roots. Each tribe brought its own spices and salt made from burning specific leaves — a rich exchange of flavors and traditions that honored both life and death.

People have lived in the amazon forest for more than 10 00O years, although many tribes have disappeared in the wake of road-builders, loggers, missionaries, and imported diseases. One exception is the Zo’é, first « contacted » only three decades ago. These huner-gathereres live in small communities and wear no clothes. Salgado followed them into the jungle when they went hunting for monkeys and fish with bows and arrows, and watched them grind manioc root into flour. Typically, the women in Zo’é village of Towari Ypy use the red fruit of the urucum to color their bodies. It is also used in cooking, where it adds a mild, earthy flavor with slightly peppery and nutty notes. The urucum is a shrub or small tree originating from tropical regions of the Americas. It has long been used by American Indians as body paint, especially for the lips, thus earning the nickname of “lipstick tree”. Urucum has a vibrant red-orange colour— but how does one capture this intensity in black and white? Salgado reveals its chromatic magic through texture and contrast: the urucum powder becomes a velvety grain on the skin.

If you’re wondering about these striking chin adornments, they’re called botoques—traditional pieces of wood worn by both Zo’é men and women, inserted through the lower lip and chin. Notice how only the young girl at the center lacks them: these piercings are earned during adolescence as a rite of passage. Over time, the botoques are enlarged, sometimes growing to 7–8 cm in diameter—a powerful visual marker of beauty and social standing within the community.

Mentawai is a small island on the southern part of Sumatra in Indonesia. Until recently, it hosted fierce tribes that had managed to preserve their traditions, in spite of the rapid development of Indonesia. Siberut, because of its deep forest without roads, is the place where these tribes have managed to keep their original lifestyle. As can be seen from the photo, the forest is indeed rich, intricate and almost impenetrable.

To capture this image of young Mentawai climbing 130-foot durian trees, the challenges were immense—both for the climbers and the photographer. How was such a shot achieved? At this dizzying height, the young climber shrinks to insect scale. Salgado’s framing shows this metamorphosis; what we witness isn’t just a harvest, but nature’s relentless mathematics—where man, tree, and gravity perform an ancient equation.

The highlands of Papua New Guinea are the country’s most densely populated and productive region. Today, they have the thze country’s more extensive road system, and a healthy economy based on coffee, tea, gold and copper.

The singsing, a celebratory festival of dance, can happen for all sorts of reasons, and it is always spectacular, with highlanders in traditional costume and face paint dancing in formation and playing their kundus (an hourglass shaped drum with lizard skin). The Enga show, the Hagen show, and the Paya show are annual events that bring together thousands of performers. Body art and personal decoration, called bilas are particularly sophisticated. While the Sepik people and other Papua New Guineans create beautiful cravings and artifacts, the highlanders use themselves as rustic canvases: they paint their bodies and dress up in feathers, pearls, animal skins, to represent birds, trees or mountain spirits. On occasions, an important event, such as legendary battle, is reenacted at a singsing.

The background music has some of the singing from the Mount Hagen villagers.

In the early 1990s, Kuwait made headlines worldwide due to the war that different nations fought within its boundaries. Salgado’s series, known as Kuwait: A Desert of Fire, documenting the environmental devastation caused by the Gulf War, is epitomized by an image of firefighters battling an oil inferno. The apocalyptic scene emphasizes the destructive impact of war on both humanity and nature. By including workers and firefighters in his frames, he provides a tangible scale to the enormity of the disaster. The choice to capture the Kuwaiti oil fires in black and white lends a timeless and dramatic quality to the series; it strips the images of any distractions, focusing the viewer’s attention on the raw emotion and gravity of the situation.

Salgado’s Kuwait photograph captures a firefighter, on the verge of surrender. On another photograph on his right, another firefighter becomes a living negative—his human form dissolving into the industrial nightmare around him. These men, likely Western expats, wage a futile war against the impossible: extinguishing an oil well inferno.To kill a fire like this, crews first blast the flames with high-powered water jets, then starve them of oxygen.

Salgado documents more than an ecological disaster—he shows ordinary men transformed into soldiers of absurdity, battling the consequences of human greed itself.

We are also introduced here to one of the classical themes of Salgado that will reappear later in the exhibition. These are photo of people so immerse in their environment that their skins is covered by dark material, be it oil, coal, mud, transforming the photo into a negative and highlighting the lighter part of the bodies: The eyes and the mouth.

Sebastião Salgado first went to Rwanda in 1971. He was a young economist at the time, helping local communities develop their own tea and coffee plantations. He was interested in the production of monocultures farmed exclusively in Third World countries, and in how these were subject to price dictatorships set by markets in countries that had often never produced a single ounce of the product. He returned in 1991 while working on Workers, hoping to revisit the plantations he had helped create. But the plantations were burned to the ground after the genocide. As a photographer, he witnessed the country's devastation in 1994, and returned again in 1995 to document the return of the refugees. Rwanda's tea now ranks among the world's best and most expensive due to its high-altitude volcanic soils (2000m+) and artisanal processing. You should try Gisovu Golden—a premium black tea with honeyed malt notes, grown near Lake Kivu.

During his visit to Cuban sugarcane plantations, Salgado realized that it is not man who shapes the cane, but the cane that shapes the man. Like in Brazil, the sugar workers looked almost identical in the way they worked, moved, dressed, and even enjoyed themselves. In Cuba, just a few kilometers from the sugar mills, Salgado met tobacco workers who belonged to a completely different world. Wearing hairnets to handle the tobacco leaves destined to become famous cigars — considered as prestigious as French grand cru wines — these workers bore little resemblance to the sugarcane workers. They were much closer in spirit to vineyard workers. For Salgado, it was clear that the product shapes the worker. He noted that the delicate nature of tobacco work required specific practices. During the cigar rolling process, someone would tell stories. In the past, these were tales such as the life of King Arthur. When Salgado was there, he heard stories about Lenin, Marx, and other political revolutions. In both cases, the purpose was to help workers concentrate to achieve perfect results. Salgado found this system of production incredible to witness.

In Bangladesh, the same ancient jute weaving technique is used to produce grain sacks — and the famous sandbags used to reinforce trenches and protect soldiers. When hit by bullets, the jute sacks seal themselves without spilling their contents, making them a surprisingly effective barrier. This idea of transformation fascinated Salgado. Ships that once carried goods and people across the globe — connecting the world — are, once deemed too old, sent to Bangladesh, or sometimes parts of India or Pakistan where metal is scarce. There, they are dismantled and reborn as thousands of iron fragments. These fragments are turned into knives, farming tools, and household items — often identical to those the ship once carried across oceans. Bronze propellers become teapots, earrings, or ornaments worn by women in Bengal. These objects have traveled the world before taking on a new life. Salgado was amazed by the sophistication of this process and its cyclical poetry: “I thought — he said, I’m part of an incredible species!” But there’s a dark side. The same silicosis that destroys the lungs of coal and iron miners also afflicts shipyard workers. In Bangladesh’s ship-breaking yards, the symptoms are the same. For Salgado, Workers revealed the full geopolitical chain of production — and its human cost.

In 1989, Sebastião Salgado traveled to the coal mining region of Dhanbad, in Bihar, India. At the time, around 150,000 miners were working day and night shifts in extreme underground heat, reaching up to 55°C. These mines, once operated by the British, had been abandoned without proper closure, and underground fires had since ignited. The earth smoldered, smoke rose through cracks, and ground collapses threatened villages. Despite the harsh conditions, the mines supported the livelihoods of nearly 400,000 people. Families lived from both small-scale farming and coal extraction, with men, women, and even children working above and below ground. But what Salgado witnessed was more than physical labor — it was the beginning of a social rupture. As open-pit mines and massive machinery replaced manual work, thousands were expelled from their land and left jobless. Entire families moved to the edges of growing cities, where they lived in poverty. Some returned to the mines under cover of darkness, stealing coal to survive — scavenging from land that was once their own. From farmers who once worked the mines, they had become the urban poor — and night thieves on their former property. With Workers and later Migrations, Salgado sought to document these human tragedies — the cost of replacing human hands with machines in the name of industrial progress.

Note how Sa;glado capture the eyes of these workers, very much like he did with the young woman picking up tea in Rwanda earlier. This treatment of the eyes is one of Salgado signature. They are wide-open, direct, confident and usually friendly – though this stranger Salgado must be standing only a couple of meters in front of them. These eyes translate a profound dignity of man in the face of terrible hardship.

Salgado’s photograph of Serra Pelada—thousands of men climbing the walls of an open-pit gold mine—is one of his most iconic images. This is a photo about the folly of gold, very much like the mad gold-rush that happened in the US in the later part of the XIX century.

He took it in 1986, after years of being denied access due to political restrictions. When he finally arrived, 50,000 workers were digging by hand, shoulder to shoulder, in a crater as large as a stadium, 70 meters deep. No machines—just human labor and ambition.

On his first day, Salgado was mistaken for a spy from a major mining company. A policeman even arrested him. But that misunderstanding helped—when the miners saw the police treating him roughly, they realized he wasn’t the enemy. He was welcomed. He lived among them for weeks.

The rules are brutal: Men descend the left-side mud ladder in a human chain, running downward, risking to fall. Each volunteer chooses one random sack of dirt per day, hoping for gold flecks. The mine was tough and dangerous, yet all the men were there by choice, chasing the dream of striking gold. Most never did. But for those who found it, a single sack of dirt could mean five grains—or five kilos—of gold. It was a brutal lottery, but also a place of surprising humanity, tenderness, and even dreams—like one miner who told Salgado his greatest wish was to go to Paris… to get breast implants.

In 1984 and 1985, the region of Sahel in Africa suffered a drought at a scale that it had never reached before, while in certain countries, such as Chad and Ethiopia, war was raging on. Due to the drought, the exodus was amplified and drove populations of people out from their villages to places where they could hope to survive. Sebastião Salgado spent 18 months photographing the catastrophe in Mali, Chad, Ethiopia, Sudan, and Eritrea, and worked closely with the Doctors Without Borders team. These images have made their appearance in the world after being published by international news outlets. Salgado’s harrowing documentation of the Sahel famine for Médecins Sans Frontières earned him both the World Press Photo Award and the Oscar Barnack Prize.

This photograph of the mother and her child carries the biblical gravity characteristic of Salgado’s work—seen also in his images of Brazil’s gold mines. Here, the mother and child evoke Renaissance icons of the Madonna and Child. The composition borrows sacred visual codes, presenting a testament of human endurance in the face of abandonment, and holy vision through it. It is a very touching and spiritual photo and a tribute to motherhood.

Salgado explains about the other photograph of the blind woman on the left: ““With dead eyes worn out by sand, storms and chronic infections, this woman from the region of Gondan has arrived at the end of her voyage.”. This woman has fled famine in Gondan, Africa and reached Mali and a refugee camp where medical help and supplies are available. As on the photograph on the right, this image carries biblical dimensions of suffering. The composition echoes classical pietàs: a single soul bearing the weight of collective tragedy, where even salvation feels like abandonment.

In 1993, after publishing Workers, Salgado and his partner Lélia began envisioning a new project: Exodus. For six years, he traveled across India, Latin America, Iraq, and beyond, documenting one of the biggest human transformations of our time—the massive shift from rural life to urban centers, driven by industrial change and economic pressure. Each year in the early 1990s, 150 to 200 million people left the countryside for cities. For the first time in history, more than half of humanity lived in urban areas—most in extreme poverty. In São Paulo’s favelas or Mexico City’s ciudades perdidas, the scenes were nearly identical: makeshift shelters, overcrowded families. Across the globe, the poor began to look alike—displaced by the same forces benefiting only a few. Salgado saw echoes of his own life in these migrations. Though he left Brazil for studies, when the regime refused to renew his passport, he became a refugee himself. Exodus became a tribute to the courage, resilience, and dignity of the displaced—and a call to rebuild human solidarity in the 21st century.

This is again an iconic picture from Salgado. It shows the Mumbai station during commuting hours, looking like a beehive. Everyone is wearing the same white shirt and everyone is in motion, contrasting with the physical stillness of the two trains.

Can you spot two motionless figures on this photograph?A man, standing with a suitcase, and a woman waiting on a bench. Their stark, ghostly presence against the station’s chaos feels like the opening frame of a film, frozen in anticipation. Out of so many people, how can there be only these two not moving!

Salgado also went to the Balkans during the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, where he met people torn apart by conflict. Millions of Yugoslavs suddenly became Serbs, Croats, or Bosniaks, forced to flee their homes. He saw Roma families under threat, and later, the mass exodus of Albanians and Kosovars. The similarities between these tragedies weighed heavily on him. He found himself face to face with victims of a global system that, despite its different faces, often leads to the same result. Many were living through the worst moments of their lives, yet they allowed him to photograph them—perhaps hoping their suffering would be seen. Salgado thought he was prepared, after years of witnessing hardship. But the sheer brutality and hatred in the Balkans shocked him, as he hadn’t imagined that ethnic cleansing could still happen in Europe. The path slicing through the center and the train visually embody this rupture—the new border coming from the disintegration of the region. The child stays in the middle, uncertain where he belongs. The train, drawing a perpendicular line is like a promise of a way out to a better place and a better future.

In 1996, the Foundation for the Well-Being of Minors center, located in the Pacaembu neighborhood of São Paulo, Brazil, housed approximately 430 children. These minors were either abandoned or placed there by parents who could no longer care for them. FEBEM aimed to provide shelter, education, and support to vulnerable youth, offering a structured environment to promote their well-being and reintegration into society. However, the institution also faced criticism for poor conditions and inadequate treatment of the children in the late 90’s. This situation reflected the consequences of Brazil's rapid and unequal urban development. São Paulo expanded dramatically throughout the 20th century, attracting over 2 million rural migrants between the 1970s and 1990s. But the city could not keep up with the growing population — housing, infrastructure, and public services were insufficient. As a result, countless families were pushed into overcrowded favelas, often lacking access to clean water, electricity, or education— leading to dramatic situations like the one Salgado denounces in his Exodus (Migrations) project.

The series Exodus (Migrations) covers the nightmare of Rwandan refugees in the aftermath of a genocide that saw between 500 000 and 1 million people slaughtered – by some estimates accounting for 20% of Rwanda’s total population.During the genocide in Rwanda, Salgado told The Guardian, “I was doing a book about exodus – migration. What I saw there was so violent that I became sick. I felt depression, my health was not well. I went to see a doctor-friend, who told me ‘you’re dying, you must stop what you’re doing.’ So I stopped, I went to Brazil, and I made a decision to abandon photography and to become a peasant and work the land.” Through it all, Salgado kept photographing. He found himself having to explain the role of the photographer: “People ask me, how can you take pictures of such horror?” he said. “Because photography is my language. I don’t create these tragedies—I document them. That is my role: to look, to bear witness, and to show the world what it prefers not to see.”

Born in Brazil, Salgado grew up around his father's coffee business, and he vividly remembers the smell of fresh beans arriving from the fields."Coffee is in my blood," said Salgado, explaining how he got involved with the coffee photo essay.

But before becoming a photographer, Sebastião Salgado was an economist. In the early 1970s, he worked with the World Bank and the FAO, helping to develop agricultural diversification projects in East Africa. He was responsible for countries like Rwanda, Burundi, and the Congo, and helped introduce tea cultivation in regions traditionally dependent on coffee. The goal was to stabilize prices and improve livelihoods through long-term development.It was during these missions that Salgado discovered the inequality behind global trade: coffee workers laboring barefoot under the sun for wages that couldn’t sustain their families, while the profits flowed elsewhere. Years later, as a photographer, Salgado returned to those same landscapes, this time with a camera instead of spreadsheets. His mission was the same: to show the world the dignity, the hardship, and the resilience of those who produce what we consume—and to challenge the global systems that keep them invisible. The photographic itinerary, which was built shot by shot, features ten of the countries we buy our coffee from: Brazil, India, Indonesia, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Colombia, China, Costa Rica, El Salvador and Tanzania.

Salgado came a few times to China from the late 80’s until the early 2010’s. One of this visit was focused on China's coffee industry, which was a big surprise for Salgado.He admitted he had no idea that China even produced coffee. During his visit to coffee plantations in Baoshan and Simao, in Yunnan Province—better known for its pu’er tea—he photographed families who have worked the land for deacdes. Salgado's photo show generations of families and the processing that beans undergo before the drink is brewed and served in a cup."But coffee production in China is different from what you see in other countries," noted Salgado. He also said "Chinese coffee producers are 50 years ahead of what I saw in other countries.""When I first came to China, it was a different country. Everything has changed," said Salgado, who visited the country in the 1990s for his photo essay "Migrations: Humanity in Transition," which chronicles the plight of immigrants and refugees.

From 1977 to 1984, after many years of photographic journeys in Europe and Africa, Sebastião Salgado made many trips to Latin America, going to sweltering regions and those that were low and on the coast. He journeyed from the northwest of Brazil through to the mountains of Chile, to Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Mexico.

This deeply moving photograph captures an intimate yet very theatrical moment—a child examined by the nurse. The nurse’s focused tenderness contrasts with the child’s vulnerable stillness, creating a scene both heartbreaking and sacred. Here, the family waits in quiet patience, their watchful eyes fixed on the scene as the child basks in a celestial beam of light—as if sanctified by the nurse’s care.

This photo has all the characteristics of a classical renaissance painting. From the emotional tension, to the elaborate composition using lines of sights and shares, to the use of chiaroscuro. Close your eyes slightly and look at it as if it was a painting, you’ll see that Salgado comes from a long line of masters.

In 1983, in a small village in Northeast Brazil, Sebastião Salgado captured a haunting image: children playing with a small black box. That box followed them everywhere—at mass, in the cemetery, during the procession for the dead, and even at the parish dance. Always nearby was an old woman, quietly watching. The next morning, a young boy approached the local priest, Don Gabicho, asking him to say a mass at his grandmother’s house. When they arrived, the old woman from the day before greeted them and asked the priest to hold a service for her deceased husband. Confused—he hadn’t heard of a recent death—the priest hesitated. Then, without drama, the woman opened the little black box. Inside were human bones. For seven years, she had kept her husband’s remains with her, carried tenderly by the children of her family.

This very famous photograph captures two young boys seated against an imposing backdrop of tall, spiky cacti and undulating mountains. The boys, dressed in simple sweaters and wearing distinctively folded hats, gaze directly at the viewer, exuding a sense of introspection and calm. Their posture and expression convey an intimate connection with their surroundings, which is steeped in cultural and natural beauty. With their indigenous features and the silence that emergences from this photograph, these boys embody the soul of Salgado's Other Americas—so powerfully that this image became the book's iconic cover.

In Atillo, a remote town clinging to the edge of the Andes, Sebastião Salgado was captivated by the way people endured the cold—wrapped in heavy sheepskins, faces weathered by altitude and mist. At thirteen thousand feet, the air was thin and wet, the clouds brushing the ground. Locals told him of a legend etched into the land itself. Don Rafael and Antonio Pérez showed Salgado the winding streambed below. It wasn’t just a river, they said—it was the scar left by la culebra loca, a monstrous snake born from Lake Atillo, which had once devoured all the village’s cattle. Fleeing in terror, the people took refuge in the mountains. Pursued by torch-bearing Indigenous men, the beast eventually vanished into the earth. From the hole it left behind, they believed, the volcano Chimborazo had risen.

During his time in the remote village of Atillo, high in the Ecuadorian Andes, Sebastião Salgado spent evenings speaking with villagers who had never before met a foreigner. Their curiosity was immense, shaped by deep isolation and strong religious traditions. At night, they gathered around to listen as Salgado spoke of distant lands—of the Holy Land, Spain, Mexico, and the Moors. One night they asked him to talk about the Amazon River. He explained how their small mountain stream, the Culebra, was part of a vast network—feeding the Cebadas, then the Pastaza, then the Marañón, until at last it became the Amazon River, traveling over 3,000 miles to the Atlantic Ocean. That story changed something. The villagers, who once saw the Culebra as a minor trickle disappearing nearby, now viewed it with reverence. It was no longer just their stream—it was a river on a long, dangerous journey through the jungle to a distant sea.

This is classic photography trick – almost a perfect archetype of it. The boy's direct gaze meeting the lens, the turned back of the hatted men and women, the curious tilt of a child's head: together they create human theater of extraordinary dramatic power.

This final image distills Salgado's decades-long journey - from the untouched wilderness of Genesis to the industrial crucibles of Workers, from the global coffee plantations to Brazil's deafening gold mines, through the Sahel's silent tragedies and millions uprooted by exile - arriving at this quiet epiphany: two Mixe Indians standing as living crucifixes, their arms outstretched in prayer to the goddess of earth and fertility, in gratitude to a good harvest. After bearing witness to humanity's capacity for both devastation and endurance, we find this perfect counterpoint: not despair, but gratitude; not extraction, but reciprocity.

Audio Guide Content Production

Text: Laetitia Cagnat

Translation: Sean Wang

Read by: Natacha Devillers

Production: Sean Wang