Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado, considered to be one of the most important exponents of photography in the world, died this Friday (23) at the age of 81. The information was provided by the newspaper The New York Times, citing Instituto Terra, a non-governmental organization founded by the artist.

"Sebastião was much more than one of the greatest photographers of our time. Alongside his life partner, Lélia Deluiz Wanick Salgado, he sowed hope where there was devastation and made the idea flourish that environmental restoration is also a profound gesture of love for humanity. Her lens revealed the world and its contradictions; her life, the power of transformative action," reads a statement from the Instituto Terra.

Known for his documentary work and for shooting in black and white, Salgado won the world's main photography prizes and died on the day the exhibition "Venham Mais Cinco - O Olhar Estrangeiro sobre a Revolução Portuguesa (1974-1975)" opens in Almada, which includes photos of him taken during the revolution.

The Brazilian photographer lived with his wife, Lélia Salgado, and their son in an apartment in Paris, where he died.

Born in Minas Gerais in 1944, Salgado transformed photojournalism by recording the reality of workers, conflicts, refugees, native peoples and territories at risk.

With a degree in Economics from the Federal University of Espírito Santo, and a post-graduate degree from the University of São Paulo (USP), he was forced to go into exile in Paris in 1969, during the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964-1985), where he obtained a doctorate in Economics and began working for the International Coffee Organization as a consultant in the control of plantations in Africa.

Three years later, he began his career in photojournalism, also in Paris, where he worked for major photo agencies such as Sigma, Gama and Magnum.

In 1981, he photographed the assassination attempt on former US President Ronald Reagan in Washington, gaining worldwide prominence and, with the money from the sale of his photographs to newspapers, he undertook his first authorial project in Africa, where he made his first reports on drought and famine in Niger and Ethiopia.

In his first book, "Other Americas", from 1986, he documented the geographical and human landscape of cities along the Brazilian coast and in countries such as Bolivia, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Guatemala and Mexico.

That same year, he created one of the most iconic photos of his career, entitled "Serra Pelada", which The New York Times included among the 25 images that have defined modernity since 1955.

The image showed the brutal reality of miners working in Serra Pelada, in the Amazon rainforest, a place known at the time Salgado made his records as the region that was home to the largest open-pit gold extraction in the world.

Salgado's most notable work included covering the Rwandan genocide in 1994.

In the 2000s he released "Exoduses", in which he portrayed migratory movements at the end of the 20th century due to wars, persecution and environmental disasters.

The Brazilian photographer was also an environmental activist who, with Lélia Salgado, founded Instituto Terra, a reforestation project in Brazil that began on the farm he inherited from his father in Minas Gerais, where he has already planted millions of trees promoting the recovery of the Atlantic Forest, one of the most important Brazilian biomes located mainly on the coast, but which is also expanding to other parts of the southeast of the country.

(Photo DR)