Deauville – Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado's 40-year career, over the course of which he has travelled to more than 130 countries, is being celebrated with an exhibition in Deauville, Normandy.
"You know, everything in this life passes at an incredible speed. I didn’t see the time go by," Salgado said, upon opening the exhibition at the Franciscaines cultural centre. "I’ve done a lot of things, I’ve travelled, I’ve captured images. And this morning, when I arrived here, I felt a summary of my life and it moved me deeply."
The photographer, who has spent much of his life in Paris and in 2019 was given a place in France's prestigious institution for artists, the Academy of Fine Arts, explained that he was feeling "a bit battered" due to medical reasons.
"The happiest day of my life was when I turned 80. I've lost so many friends. We were all together in Goma [Democratic Republic of Congo] for four years, four photographers were murdered, and I was there. So being alive at 80 is an immense privilege."
For this exhibition, supported by the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP), Salgado took part in selecting the photos, which are being displayed in smaller formats to offer a better vision of his work.
It is a body of work spanning more than 40 years, in which he travelled to all corners of the world, capturing themes as diverse as the precarious nature of manual labour amid the transformation of the industrial world – as seen in "The Hand of Man" – and human migration, as seen in "Exodus".
'An immense universe'
"As a photographer, we ask ourselves questions [...] about security, legitimacy, ethics, and more generally about the world," Salgado explained.
His work has taken him to more than 130 countries, photographing gold mines, oil fields in Kuwait during the Gulf War and the genocide in Rwanda. This, he says, was his most difficult assignment, and he eventually had to stop covering it on the advice of his doctor.
After this, he returned to Brazil with his family for three months and began reconsidering his work as a photographer.
"Before, I believed in one species: mine. What made me completely lose hope in my species was discovering that we are a terrible, violent, horrible species, that we are destroying our planet. And discovering other species, I fell that I was part of an immense universe of species."
In 1998, he created the non-profit organisation Instituto Terra with his wife Lélia Wanick Salgado to restore the ecosystem in the Rio Doce Basin in Brazil.
'The Amazon is paradise on earth'
For his series "Genesis" (2004-2011), Salgado traveled from the Galapagos to the Amazon, via Africa and the Arctic. "It’s perhaps one of the most interesting journeys of everything I’ve done in my life. Because the Amazon is paradise on earth," he said.
"These Amazonian populations are the prehistory of humanity. They are us from 10,000 years ago. They live in such a pleasant, gentle way, in communion with nature. There are no lies, there is no repression."
However, contemplating what he had learned from these trips, Salgado said: "I travelled for eight years across 32 countries or regions of the world, but the greatest journeys I’ve made are within myself."
The exhibition Sebastião Salgado: The MEP Collection runs until 1 June, 2025 at the Franciscaines venue in Deauville.
