‍Sebastião Salgado has worn many hats in his 81 years of life. He’s an activist, a photographer, an environmentalist, and most recently, the curator of an NFT photography collection of his work.

Since 1973, when he traded a career as an economist to start fresh as a photographer, his work has entranced the world. His signature black-and-white photographs bounce between stills of humans, animals, and nature as Salgado zeroes in on previously forgotten corners of the world and communities. His extensive photography capturing the African continent and its people over three decades has been critically acclaimed, particularly his book "Sebastião Salgado: Africa." Meanwhile, in his NFT collection, "Amazonia," he curates 5,000 images from over a decade of travels through Brazil’s Amazon. He also documents communities that preserve their ancestral traditions, living in harmony with nature despite modern encroachments.

To Salgado, photography has always been his love language, both for himself and the world. As he wrote in an Instagram caption,

“Photography is my idiom, the language through which I express myself. Many people say to me: “Sebastião, you see so many interesting things on the planet, you have the opportunity to visit incredible places, you must write about it”. I reply that I already write with photography. It is a language of permanent search, of immense depth and something that you cannot define a priori.”

Below is more on how Salgado embraced NFTs and used his work to inspire his activism.

Sebastião Salgado is an acclaimed photographer with decades of experience under his belt

While Salgado may be new to the NFT world (with a 2022 NFT collection under his belt), his photography has rocked the art world for decades. One of his significant photographic projects is "Other Americas," which highlights his importance alongside other notable works. He started his career after moving from Sao Paolo, Brazil, to Paris, France, and working for photography agencies like Magnum, where his signature emotive black-and-white photography thrived.

As The Guardian described in a recent profile of his work, Salgado’s “rise was meteoric in Paris.”

In 2022, Sotheby’s hosted an auction of Salgado’s work — “Magnum Opus,” — which chronicled his most consequential images between 1978 and 2018, a career that has spanned 50 years and immersive visits to over 100 countries. According to The Guardian, he spent 90 days in the Galapagos Islands of Ecuador, twice as long as evolutionary scientist Charles Darwin. He documented burning oil fields in Kuwait and the members of multiple tribes across Brazil’s Amazon.

According to ArtNet, Salgado’s reason-to-be has always been to uplift and spotlight other’s day-to-day reality:

“What I want is the world to remember the problems and the people I photograph. What I want is to create a discussion about what is happening around the world and to provoke some debate with these pictures.”

His first NFT collection is a retrospective of his time in Brazil’s Amazon

Salgado’s first and only NFT collection, “Amazonia,” was minted in September 2022. The collection chronicles Salgado’s time living among 12 tribes in Brazil’s Amazon, documenting the lives of various indigenous peoples. Salgado wrote an accompanying caption for each image that helps contextualize what the viewer takes in. For instance, in #2030 (the picture above), Salgado offers a deeper background on the Yawanawá tribe and how they emerged.

Salgado divides the collection into ten categories, or traits, including forests, aerial views, mountains, flying rivers, tropical storms, and five tribes — Yanomami, Yawanawá, Marubo, Anavilhanas, and Suruwahá.

The 5,000-item collection includes 1-of-1 photographs and a single 1-of-1 NFT short video film, “Tree of Life,” which Sotheby’s explains includes “original audio and over 102 indigenous people hidden within it.” The acclaimed art house auctioned the collection, and all primary and secondary proceeds went directly to Salgado’s nonprofit organization, Instituto Terra.

Together with his wife, he started Instituto Terra, an environmental restoration nonprofit

In the early 1990s, Salgado was documenting the Rwandan Genocide when a doctor told him that he needed to quit his job. The doctor explained that Salgado’s health troubles, including depressive symptoms, were due to his workload and how immersed he was in traumatic experiences. Salgado took the doctor’s orders to heart and shifted his attention from photography to starting Instituto Terra with his wife and creative partner, Lélia Deluiz Wanick Salgado. 

Instituto Terra is an environmental nonprofit focused on environmental restoration and sustainable rural development in Brazil, specifically on an old cattle farm that Salgado inherited from his family and has since been transferred into a Private Natural Heritage Reserve. Since 1998, the organization has planted over 3 million trees, brought over two thousand water springs back to life, and hosted educational programs on conservation and restoration. 

Salgado’s latest Sotheby’s auctions had all proceeds benefiting Institutio Terra’s work. In an interview, Salgado also explains that he could tap back into his photography only after committing to these environmental efforts. He pivoted from photographing only people to turning the lens onto the environment and other animals, too. 

Looking through Salgado’s body of work, it’s inspiring to see how much his world travels brought him inward to question the impact he could have on the world around him and, by doing so, challenge fans of his work to do the same. 

His work has earned him numerous awards and recognition in the field of photography

Salgado has earned some of the highest honors in photography. He won the Prince of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities, the Hasselblad Award, and the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund Grant, all recognizing not just the beauty of his photos but the powerful stories behind them. The French government named him a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur, a nod to his influence around the world. In 1993, the Royal Photographic Society awarded him the Centenary Medal and an Honorary Fellowship, celebrating the mark he’s left on the world of photography.

His photographs fill acclaimed books like "Migrations and Genesis" and have hung in major institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. In 2016, he received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade for "Kuwait: A Desert on Fire," which documents the environmental and human devastation caused by the Gulf War. Brazil also awarded him the National Order of the Southern Cross, the nation’s highest honor.

Salgado’s career continues to inspire people everywhere with stunning visual artistry, journalistic honesty, and a deep commitment to witnessing the world. Looking through Salgado’s body of work, it’s inspiring to see how much his world travels brought him inward to question the impact he could have on the world around him and, by doing so, challenge fans of his work to do the same.