Avenali Lectures

Sebastião Salgado, Avenali Chair in the Humanities 2001-2002

“Migrations: Humanity in Transition” || February 11, 2002

Webcast || Occasional Paper || Trained as an economist, with degrees from the University of Sao Paolo and Vanderbilt University and a Ph.D. (in 1971) from the University of Paris, Brazilian-born photographer Sebastião Salgado turned to photojournalism only in 1973. He was a member of Magnum Photos from 1979-1994.

Even as a photojournalist covering news events, Salgado was drawn to in-depth documentary projects with broad human scope. In Other Americas (1986), he explored peasant cultures and the cultural resistance of Indians and their descendants in Mexico and Brazil; in Sahel: Man in Distress (1986), he drew on his work in the drought-stricken Sahel region of Africa with the French aid group Doctor’s Without Borders; in Workers (1993), his work documented manual laborers facing displacement with the advent of modern technologies and machines; and in Terra: Struggle of the Landless (1997), Salgado captured the efforts of Brazilian natives fighting to reclaim their land.

Migrations, the body of photographs by Salgado on exhibit at the University Art Museum in 2002, is a seven-year chronicle of mass migrations in more than 35 countries, including Afghanistan, Kurdistan, Rwanda, Congo, Angola, Mozambique, and the Balkans. Forced from their homes by population growth, environmental degradation, natural disasters, and economic depression, these refugees, exiles, orphans, landless peasants, homeless families, and boat people constitute individually and collectively a vast and moving panorama of “humanity in transition.”

Twice the recipient of the Infinity Award for Photojournalism from the International Center of Photography, Salgado currently lives in Paris with his wife and collaborator Lélia Wanick Salgado.