Sebastião Salgado. Foto: Fernando Frazão/Agência Brasil (Wikipedia)

There were many reservations about his use of a black-and-white aesthetic for shoots on environmental and humanitarian crises. Sebastião Salgado, however, did not conceive of photography as ornament, but as document; a medium through which to clearly and with no accessories convey what he saw that all other gazes turned away from: crudeness and violence, but also dignity and integrity in the face of adversity. The Brazilian, who passed away on 23 May, originally trained as an economist, and it was in the course of travels in Africa for the World Bank that he took up the camera. Thus began an autodidact’s career that from the very beginning could rely on the inestimable support of his wife, the architect Lélia Wanick, and which would send him globetrotting first for the French agencies Sygma and Gamma, then for the prestigious Magnum, and from 1994 on for his own Amazonas Images. In series like Sahel or Êxodos, he portrayed lacerating wounds of the world in a strong exposé of the miseries of humankind that plunged him into a state of profound despondence. He would come out of it with a change of approach and with works like Genesis or Amazônia, projects which sought to show the beauty of Earth and in so doing raise awareness about the need to take care of it. An optimistic mission he also strove to carry out through firm activism for the environment, and a personal commitment to forest regeneration in his native country: his life’s brightest sparkle amid monochromatic images.