Sebastião Salgado, a celebrated Brazilian photographer whose striking images of life and nature in the Amazon rainforest won him some of the world’s top honors and made him a household name, died on Friday. He was 81.
His death was announced by Instituto Terra, the environmental nonprofit that he and his wife founded. The announcement did not say where he died or cite a cause, but Mr. Salgado’s family said that he had experienced frequent health problems after contracting malaria.
“Sebastião was much more than one of the greatest photographers of our time,” Instituto Terra said in a social media post. “His lens revealed the world and its contradictions; his life, the power of transformative action.”
Often working in black-and-white, Mr. Salgado garnered widespread acclaim at home and abroad with striking images of the Amazon rainforest and the people living there.
Mr. Salgado, who frequently documented impoverished communities in Brazil and abroad, captured some of his most famous images in 1986, when he photographed workers toiling in a gold mine in the Brazilian state of Pará.
Over the course of his career, Mr. Salgado won some of photography’s most prestigious honors, including a Leica Oskar Barnack Award and several World Press Photo awards. He was named an honorary member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1992, and the French Academy of Fine Arts in 2016.
Mr. Salgado was born on Feb. 8, 1944, in the small town of Aimorés, in the countryside of the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. When a military dictatorship came into power in Brazil in the late 1960s, he left Brazil for France.
A complete obituary will be published soon.
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