Meet the Adventurer – Sebastião Salgado

The celebrated brazilian photojournalist has returned home to focus on environmental restoration in Vale do Rio Doce

- By Angela Locatelli

What drew you to the camera?

I was doing a PhD in economics in Paris when my wife Lélia, who was studying architecture, bought a camera. I looked through a viewfinder and my life completely changed. What I loved, what I found interesting, what made me upset I could capture it all. Photography took up so much time there was nothing left for any other activity.

How did your early life inform the stories you photojournalist?

I came from an underdeveloped country with huge social problems, and for a while I studied and worked as an economist. I was a Marxist, then became a Maoist and afterwards a hippy. These movements gave me a communitarian vision of the planet, which inevitably led me to a human, social kind of photography. I focused on this for most of my life, until I became an environmentalist.

Why did you turn to environmentalism?

As a photographer, I witnessed terrible things. After documenting the 1994 Rwandan genocide, I became sick and grew hugely depressed. A doctor recommended I rest for a few months, so Lélia and I moved back to Brazil, to the southern state of Bahia. We lived by the beach, close to ancient tribes. I became quieter, I felt better.