home articles love letters identity the mag the space TR
THE PROJECT AS THE UNIT OF WORK, SALGADO
On Sebastião Salgado, fifty years of fieldwork, and the full-scale multi-year project as a form of photography that almost no one else sustained.
Sebastião Salgado
Salgado worked on projects lasting six to eight years. Each was a sustained argument about a global system, photographed across dozens of countries and delivered as a book. Over the course of fifty years, he built six of them. The method defined what constitutes serious photographic work.
In Conversation with Sebastião Salgado(2015)
Sebastião Salgado died in Paris on the 23rd of May 2025, at the age of eighty-one. He had trained as an economist before picking up a camera at twenty-nine, and he made the switch to photography on trips to Africa in the early 1970s. Fifty years later, he left behind a body of work organised not around images but around projects.
Six of them are over fifty-two years old.
Photograph by Sebastião Salgado titled Brooks Range, Alaska,
from the series Genesis (2009)
The first was Other
Americas, begun in 1977 and closed in 1984, seven years across rural Latin
America. Then Sahel: The End of the Road, from 1984 to 1986, documenting
famine in Mali, Sudan, Ethiopia, and Chad, in collaboration with Médecins Sans
Frontières. Then, workers, from 1986 to 1993, seven years across twenty-six
countries, on industrial labour at the end of the twentieth century. Then,
migrations from 1993 to 1999, spanning six years across forty-one countries,
involved people displaced by war, poverty, and climate change. Then, from 2004
to 2013, the planet's regions were still largely untouched by industrial
development. Then, Amazônia, from 2013 to 2019, six years inside the
Brazilian Amazon, on the forest and the indigenous peoples still living within
it.from the series Genesis (2009)
Counted against his fifty-two working years, roughly eighty per cent of his career was time spent inside a long-form project.
In Conversation with Sebastião Salgado(2015)
The individual images have been reproduced so widely that the structure beneath them tends to disappear. Most writing about Salgado stays on the photographs and the aesthetic questions they raise. The photographs are the byproducts. The projects were the work. Each is a multi-year field investigation of a single subject, organised as an economist would a research question. What is the global system of industrial labour, as it actually exists, photographed across the industries and the continents that constitute it? That is what Workersanswers. The book comprises roughly 350 images from 26 countries and was assembled over seven years of fieldwork. It is not a portfolio. It is a single argument delivered in photographs.
Yanomami men on their way to hunt in Amazonas, Brazil, 2014
Photo by Sebastião Salgado
Photo by Sebastião Salgado
This was not the standard unit of photographic work in the twentieth century. Documentary photography has mostly been organised around assignments, essays, or books made from a year or two of shooting. Salgado built his career out of nothing but full-scale multi-year projects, and he repeated the form six times. It is not clear that any other major photographer has sustained this method at this scale across a career.
Sebastião Salgado's “Nenets nomads camp”, Siberia, Russia (2011)
from his Genesis series
from his Genesis series
His training is, in retrospect, the useful thing to know about him. An economist approaches a subject by defining the system, identifying the forces operating inside it, and tracking those forces over time. Salgado's books are built this way. Migrationsis not a collection of portraits of displaced people. It is a study of human displacement at a global scale, photographed across six continents and sequenced to make displacement visible as a single thing. Genesis does the same, in reverse, for the portions of the planet that industrial development has not yet reached. The sequencing is the argument. A reader moving through Workers encounters Russian coal miners, Bangladeshi shipbreakers, Kuwaiti oil field workers after the first Gulf War, and Rwandan tea pickers. The order is not incidental. The order is the structural claim.
Sebastião Salgado with wife Lélia Wanick
Salgado
The projects travelled as books, edited by his wife and long collaborator Lélia Wanick Salgado, and as large touring exhibitions that moved through museums and institutions internationally for years at a time. Both formats were designed as single works. Individual images entered wider circulation through press reproduction, but the work, as Salgado conceived it, was always the book and the show.
In Conversation with Sebastião Salgado(2015)
Alongside the photographic projects, Salgado and Lélia began a different kind of long-form work in 1998. On his family's land in Aimorés, Minas Gerais, they founded Instituto Terra, which, over the next 27 years, replanted roughly 3 million trees across 1,750 acres of destroyed Atlantic Forest. The reforestation was carried out on the same timescale as the photographic projects and was treated with the same seriousness. It was a seventh long-form project, producing a forest rather than a book.
Photograph by Sebastião Salgado,
who co-founded Instituto Terra with Lélia Wanick Salgado
who co-founded Instituto Terra with Lélia Wanick Salgado
What Salgado left, when he died in 2025, was a demonstration that a serious photographic work could be a multi-year investigation of a global system rather than a series of moments. Almost no one else working at his level sustained this method. The unit of work he chose was slower and larger than what the field normally produced, and he spent 50 years demonstrating that it was possible.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Salgado, Sebastião. Other Americas. New York, Pantheon, 1986.
Salgado, Sebastião. Sahel, The End of the Road. Berkeley, University of California Press, 2004, originally published 1986.
Salgado, Sebastião. Workers, An Archaeology of the Industrial Age. New York, Aperture, 1993.
Salgado, Sebastião. Migrations, Humanity in Transition. New York, Aperture, 2000.
Salgado, Sebastião. Genesis.Cologne, Taschen, 2013. Edited by Lélia Wanick Salgado.
Salgado, Sebastião. Amazônia.Cologne, Taschen, 2021. Edited by Lélia Wanick Salgado.
Salgado, Sebastião; Francq, Isabelle. From My Land to the Planet. Rome, Contrasto, 2014.
Wenders, Wim; Salgado, Juliano Ribeiro, directors. The Salt of the Earth. 2014.
Instituto Terra, Aimorés, Minas Gerais.