São Paulo – Brazilian photographer and environmentalist Sebastião Salgado, known for his award -winning images of nature and humanity, died at 81 years of leukemia, his family said Friday. Local media reported that he died in Paris, where he lived for more than 55 years.
Salgado’s style is marked by black and white images, rich tone and emotionally position scenarios. Many of his best photos were taken in impoverished communities, especially in the Amazon and Africa. He was recently experiencing unleashed health problems.
“Through the lens of his camera, Sebastião fought tirelessly for a more fair, human and ecological world,” said Salgado’s family in a statement.
“As a photographer who traveled the world continuously, he contracted a particular form of malaria in 2010 in Indonesia while working on his Genesis project. Fifteen years later, the complications of this disease became severe leukemia, which finally took his life,” added the family.
Previously, Instituto Terra, who was founded by Salgado and his wife Lélia Wanick Salgado, and the French Arts Academy, of which he was a member, announced his death, but did not provide details about the circumstances or where he died.
“Sebastião was more than one of the best photographers of our time,” said Instituto Terra in a statement. “His lens revealed the world and his contradictions; his life, (he brought) the power of transformative action.”
Composer Laurent Petitgirard, secretary of the French Arts Academy, said in a statement that Salgado, one of his colleagues, was “remarkable for his moral integrity, his charisma and his commitment to serve art.”
“Leave a monumental body,” Petitgirard said about a photographer who received many awards, and was elected honorary member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences in the United States in 1992 and the Academy of Fine Arts of France in 2016.
Salgado’s main works include the recent series “Amazonia”, “Workers”, which shows manual work throughout the world and “exodus” (also known as “migrations” or “Sahel”), which documents people in transit, including refugees and residents of marginal neighborhoods.
Salgado had his life and work portrayed in the documentary “The Salt of the Earth” (2014), co -directed by Wim Wenders and his son, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado. The film was nominated for an academy award for the best documentary in 2015.
One of From Brazil However, most famous artists always insisted that he was “just a photographer.”
Salgado moved to France in 1969 when Brazil endured a military dictatorship. He said that in different interviews he was then a leftist militant against the regime.
It was in Paris in 1973 that he began to completely dedicate his time to photography and develop his black and white style, years after his economy title.
His first professional works were for the Sygma agency in 1974. The following year, he documented the life of the peasants and indigenous peoples in Latin America for the Gamma agency. Five years later, he joined Magnum, a main brand for photographers, of which he later became president.
Salgado left him in 1994 to find images of Amazonia with his wife, an agency that exclusively handles his work.
The president of Brazil, Luiz Inacio Lula da SilvaHe received the support of Salgado throughout his political career, requested a minute of silence during a ceremony in the capital of Brasilia to honor “one of the best, if not the best, a photographer that the world has produced.”
“His non -conformity with the fact that the world is so unequal and its stubborn talent to portray the reality of the oppressed always served as a call for attention for the conscience of all humanity,” Lula said. “Salgado not only used his eyes and his camera to portray people: he also used the fullness of his soul and his heart.”
The president of France, Emmanuel Macron, published a photo of Salgado in Alaska on his Instagram profile as a tribute to the photographer, who also had French citizenship.
Salgado and his wife, with whom he married in 1967, raised his two children, Julian and Rodrigo, in France. His friends said every morning that the air could breathe near the Saint-Martin channel in Paris. His death also caused shock in the country he adopted.
François-Bernard Mâche, an important French composer who worked with Salgado for his exhibition “Aqua Mater” in Paris, said the Brazilian was a “authentic and warm man.”
“His gaze transformed landscapes, and beyond the spectacular, he reached a kind of inner truth (…). With him, the photograph fulfilled one of his highest ambitions when he went far beyond the simple appearances,” Mâche told The Associated Press.
The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, said that Salgado was passionate about her city.
“Tonight I cry for a very close friend, a rare soul; a loyal, discreet and sensible man. His death moves us deeply. He already leaves us an immense void,” said Hidalgo. “Paris, the city that loved him, will give him the honors he deserves.”
Currently, an exhibition of approximately 400 of Salgado’s works in the city of Deauville, in northern France is exhibited.
The Brazilian newspaper Folha de S. Paulo, who published several of Salgado’s works in recent decades, said he recently canceled a meeting with journalists in the French city of Reims due to health problems. He was scheduled to attend an exhibition with works by his son Rodrigo for a church in the same city on Saturday, The Daily reported.
Salgado and his wife had been working since the 1990s to restore part of the Atlantic forest in Minas Gerais. In 1998, they converted a plot of land that they owned in a nature reserve, according to the biography of Salgado on the website of the French Academy of Fine Arts. That same year, they created Terra Institute, which promotes reforestation and environmental education.
Until now, Instituto Terra has planted more than 3 million trees in the city of Aimores, which is in what was once a somewhat deserted region in the field of Minas Gerais state. The photographer was born there in 1944.
In an interview without date with Forbes Brazil published Thursday, Salgado said that attending the exhibition of his works in Deuville felt like a walk through his life.
“How many times in my life have my camera put aside and I sat down to cry? Sometimes I was too dramatic, and I was alone. That is the power of the photographer; being able to be there,” said Salgado.
“If a photographer is not there, there is no image. We need to be there. We expose ourselves a lot. And that’s why it is such an immense privilege.”
___ The writers of Associated Press Eléonore Hughes in Rio de Janeiro and John Leicester in Paris contributed.
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Follow the AP coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean in https://apnews.com/hub/latin-america
