Sebastiao Salgado

Sebastião Salgado trained as an economist, then picked up a camera and never gave the spreadsheets another thought. Good call. For four decades he shot the world's hardest labour — the Serra Pelada gold mines, refugee routes, drought and displacement — in black-and-white so vast and luminous that critics actually argued about it: was suffering allowed to look this beautiful? He didn't flinch. Workers, Migrations, Genesis, Amazônia — each one a years-long expedition, shot on the ground, over and over, until the scale of a thing finally fit inside a single frame. With his wife Lélia he built Instituto Terra and replanted a whole stretch of Brazilian rainforest, because obsessives don't retire, they just find the next impossible thing. He redefined what documentary photography could be — not a snapshot, an epic. He died in 2025. The work doesn't.