Until his death in 2025, Sebastião Salgado spent his life documenting what many others overlooked. Across five decades and more than 120 countries, he photographed miners, migrants, rainforests, rivers, and entire ways of life that were slipping out of view. Best known for his stark black-and-white photography, Salgado built an archive of work that is both global and deeply personal, focused on themes of labor, displacement, beauty, and survival.

In 1973, he left a promising career in economics to take up photography full time. Over the years, his work captured famine in Ethiopia, oil fires in Kuwait, and life deep inside the Amazon, where he spent years with Indigenous communities. Late in life, he turned to NFTs as another way to protect, publish, and contextualize his images. His 2022 collection, "Amazonia," brought together 5,000 photographs, with proceeds going to Instituto Terra, the environmental nonprofit he co-founded with his wife, Lélia Wanick Salgado.

Salgado often said photography was like a language. 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 was an acclaimed photographer with decades of experience under his belt

While Salgado was new to the NFT world when he minted his genesis collection, his acclaimed photography rocked the art world for decades. One of his significant photographic projects, "Other Americas," 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 once in a 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 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 was always 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, noting their transformation over the past 50 years from a community deeply affected by generational trauma to a 1,200-person society that reclaimed its language, traditions, and identity under the leadership of Biraci Brasil Yawanawá.

Salgado divided 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 explained 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 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 legacy 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 clear 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.