SEBASTIÃO SALGADO: THE AMAZONIA PROJECT

Long-term projects are nothing new. In fact, that’s his modus operandi. He has been focused on multi-year, mostly self-assigned projects throughout his career. Many have been published in book form, including: Americas, Sahel, Workers, Migrations and Genesis.

In 1998, Salgado and his wife Lélia founded Instituto Terra as an NGO focused on environmental restoration through reforestation and sustainable rural development in Brazil’s Rio Doce Valley. The region’s dense forest had given way to a massive cattle ranch, and with it deforestation and soil erosion. Salgado was no stranger to this land. He grew up there. His father, Sebastião Salgado, Sr., was a cattle rancher. The Salgados’ goal is to return to nature what decades of environmental degradation had destroyed.

Though his father had encouraged his namesake to become a lawyer, Salgado’s university years were focused on economic studies before he began a career as an economist for the International Coffee Organization (ICO). While this background did not involve photography, his deep understanding of economics and its impact on cultures and the environment has deeply informed his storytelling with a camera.

BLACK & WHITE: We can’t slow down time, but we can use it, and there are few if any people on the planet that have used their limited time here better than you. Do you have a new project you’re planning to start?

SEBASTIAO SALGADO: To photograph, no. They take a long time to do, six, eight years. I’m 80 years old. If I start a project now, I cannot finish it, because in five, six years, I’ll be done. That will be the end. It’s not that I’m taking a rest. I’ve been working on my archives, because I’m probably one of the photographers who worked the most in the history of photography. I’m preparing a large show that will be happening in Los Angeles at the Wende Museum next year about the workers of the Soviet Union from photographs I did thirty, forty years ago, many that have never been seen. I’m editing an amazing amount of pictures that I never used before. I have a show in Brazil with pictures I took fifty years ago in Portugal. In 1974, there was a revolution there when the dictatorship ended and democracy started. It also finished Portugal’s colonial wars. They were among my earliest pictures.

BW: You first started taking photographs after your wife gave you a camera to take with you on a business trip for the International Coffee Organization to Africa.

SS: Absolutely. That was in 1972. I changed my profession. Two years later, I was a professional photographing in Portugal. We are Brazilians, we came from Portugal. We speak Portuguese. And Portugal was one of the most unhappy countries on the planet until they put out the dictator. I went there with my wife on our own to see the new democracy. I started working with the Sigma Agency, then became a photographer for Gamma. With Gamma the Portugal story became so important we went back and rented an apartment in Lisbon with our son and lived there for eight months doing pictures of this incredible revolution called Carnation. At the same time, I was traveling to Mozambique and Angola documenting the end of the colonial wars there and the beginning of their independence.

BW: What was your last major project before focusing on your archives?

SS: The Amazon for almost seven years to finish the last part. I started to work in the beginning of 2013, and I finished in 2019. There are also pictures I took in 1998, 2004, 2005 inside my book Amazônia.

BW: In a sense, you came home to do your final long-term project.

SS: That was the idea. A lot of destruction was going on there. I knew I had to do documentary work in the Amazon. Brazil is the country where I was born. I have a moral need, an ethical need, to go there and photograph. I did 58 trips to the Amazon. There were many aspects to these pictures. Permission from the Brazilian environmental ministry, then authorization through the National Foundation of the Indians to work with the indigenous people. Then someone had to be sent from there to get authorization from the Indians to be accepted by them.

Normally, we started on a big boat on a big river, then the rivers became smaller, and we switched to smaller boats with all our food and supplies. The National Foundation doesn’t allow you to eat the food of the Indians. We needed to bring a cook and two translators. We had to bring two captains that knew how to deal inside the bush and create an encampment beside the village. When the Indians went to hunt or fish they would go for weeks, and we went with them. It was necessary to have an anthropologist that knew the Indians and their language. There are more than 200 languages in the Amazon.

I went with between twelve and sixteen people each time and paid for all this myself. I had no sponsors, no magazines. My prints are for museums and collectors. I got authorization from the Brazilian army’s high command to fly with them on their missions inside the Amazon on their planes and helicopters with the window open. The Amazon is a huge space. You don’t see the forest when you’re inside it. To get the landscape, you must be in the air or on the river. Getting all these authorizations was not easy, but it was a marvelous moment in my life to be inside one of the most pristine places in the world.

BW: Your institute in Brazil was created on the land where you grew up and where your father was a cattle rancher. You’ve been active returning it to its natural state.

SS: We have planted more than three million trees so far. All the mammals are coming back. We recently received a donation from the Zurich Insurance Company to buy land, and now our institution is the biggest environmental institution in Brazil.

I started to see in one of the trees that we planted thousands of insects, ants, termites. We had birds, we had animals. These species are as important as our species. It’s not that our species started dominating the others that we’re more important. The planet depends on each one of these species. I discovered in this moment that there is a huge hope that the planet will rebuild itself if we participate and understand that we are part of it. The animal species, the vegetable species, the mineral species, they are all integrated together. If we do not integrate ourselves in this planetary movement, then we are assured of death, we will not exist anymore.

BW: If you leave the natural world alone, it recovers.

SS: Termites come back, then the animals that eat the termites return, life returns to the way it was. As soon as we get out of the way, nature knows how to fix itself. The planet is not really in danger. What’s in danger is humanity. The planet, after we disappear, will recover. The forests will come back. The planet will rebuild itself. No problem. We will disappear if we don’t integrate with our planet. We came out of our planet, and we must in some way go back to our planet.

The human species must protect our planet by replanting trees, rehabilitating sources of water and protecting biodiversity so we can live in peace. We don’t understand this. I don’t very much like using cars. When I come to LA, I walk. No one walks in LA. When you stop at a red light, here come four or five huge trucks with one guy inside each. I don’t know how many liters of petrol are burned. It’s not possible to keep going in this direction.

We must be mindful of the planet. We must see how it’s become hot, how water is disappearing. We must see that we are destroying the biodiversity that pollinizes all the plants. If we deal properly with our planet, we can survive. If not, our planet will push us out. That’s what is happening, we are starting to be pushed out of our planet. We destroy everything. The way agriculture puts poison everywhere killing all the biodiversity. To get agriculture we are pumping water from rivers, so in the end there’s no more water. Now they’re digging deep into the ground to get the water. How will we survive?

BW: We are in big trouble.

SS: And now it’s hitting. All this ice is melting, and ocean levels are rising. We are going to lose a lot of land. Huge wars will happen with countries invading other countries to survive if we don’t take care of the issues. We want to consume. We want to put money in our bank accounts. Each one has two, three cars.

BW: Conflict photographers tend to run from one hot spot to another. That’s not you.

SS: No, it’s not me at all. I work on very few stories. But each of these stories is composed of tens of smaller stories to create a bigger story. That was the case when I worked in Kuwait with Kathy Ryan for The New York Times Magazine. I remember, I was in Venezuela working on a story on the oil industry for the Workers book when Saddam Hussein started to put fires in the oil wells in Kuwait. I called Kathy from Venezuela and said, “We must do this story because those are the most important oil wells on the planet. The capitalist world will not allow this. They will invade and push Saddam Hussein out and put out the fires and cap the oil wells. That’s the story.” Three months later, I was there shooting for The New York Times Magazine. I saw the way things were going to unfold.

BW: Now you’re pulling from your massive archives to create new stories.

SS: I’ve taken a lot of photos in my lifetime, but I see photographers working now, they press the button and they don’t release it. “How can this guy edit? How can they choose one image?” I probably have 500,000 to 700,000 work prints, the size of postal cards on fiber paper. Every story I did, I came back and made contact sheets, I did a lot of editing, then we made work prints.

BW: When you’re in the Amazon, are there tribes fighting each other?

SS: There’s very little violence between tribes in the Amazon. I never saw anything. They are very isolated from each other. They have huge territories. There are not too many people. You see, tribes learned the aggressivity from the outside when the Europeans came. The majority of the tribes don’t kill each other. There are tribes in the Amazon that do not eat hot-blooded animals that would make them aggressive. They believe if they eat a snake or a tortoise or a fish, animals with cold blood, they are less aggressive. Aggression has the least value on their scale of values. We become aggressive when divisions appear, when borders appear. When an Indian dies, his bows and arrows are put in a fire. No one gets anything. All the disasters we now have came with population, came with the borders, came with imperialism.

BW: Despite the amazing work your foundation and others are doing to protect the Brazilian Amazon, it has lost 18 percent of its rainforest due to illegal logging, soy agriculture and cattle ranching, according to Greenpeace.

SS: There is huge pressure on Brazil not to cut the Amazon because it’s needed to filter the world’s carbon dioxide. The more carbon dioxide created in the Northern Hemisphere, the more filters are needed in the Southern Hemisphere. We need to reduce emissions here and help the people there if we want to protect the forest. We can’t think more about what “they” must do. It’s a global solution. If we don’t get global solutions for our problems, the people in the underdeveloped countries will continue to flee to the more-developed ones, which creates problems in those countries.

We need to bring investment to every country around the world. The rate of population growth needs to decrease. The way of living for all has to become better. We can say, “Oh, well, but the way we’ve developed here in the United States, France, Germany and Japan is not the ideal way.” Of course it’s not the ideal way, but it is a way. And it’s the way the underdeveloped countries must evolve. It’s better than going back to the Stone Age. We need to transfer education, technical information, better mining and agricultural techniques. Show the poorer countries how to produce enough food for their people to eat. We can transfer this type of technology. In the end, [we need] to transfer real investment, money to create jobs. The Amazon is being destroyed because there are millions of people there who need to survive.

ADDENDUM

Our thanks to Sebastião Salgado, and special thanks to the Peter Fetterman Gallery (peterfetterman.com) and the staff at Amazonas Images for their assistance with this interview. All images © Sebastião SALGADO / Amazonas images. See more at institutoterra.org.