“I photograph to testify, not to preserve.”
– Sebastião Salgado, quoted in Lélia Wanick Salgado (ed.), Genesis
(Cologne: Taschen, 2013), 14.
It was Fall 2005, and I had made my way to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris to see Sebastião Salgado: Territories and Lives. More than an exhibition, it was a map of visual conscience: a catalogue of finished works and works in progress, anchored by an intimate interview with Salgado himself. It offered arresting imagery and a reflective scaffold for understanding the conditions of image-making in a fractured world. It was there that I first encountered the question that would quietly accompany me for years: how do images reveal the cartography of dispossession? Following that visit, I was quietly told of a rare catalogue—a treasure, they called it—available only through a discreet chain of sellers across the city. Thus began my pursuit: through backstreets, from one antiquarian to another, until I finally held it in my hands. That moment marked the inception of my long engagement with Salgado’s work, a relationship less with photography than with a way of seeing, a form of witnessing that has since shaped my understanding of visual ethics in the contemporary condition.
In the chiaroscuro of Sebastião Salgado’s photographic vision, the world is both revealed and veiled—revealed in the stark clarity of its dispossession, veiled in the ambiguities of representation. Salgado’s camera does not merely record reality; it performs an elegiac reckoning with the failures of modernity. Born in Aimorés, Brazil, in 1944, trained first as an economist, Salgado traversed a world defined by the scars of imperial extraction, migratory upheaval, and ecological ruin. His contribution to photography lies not in a singular aesthetic revolution but in merging visual documentary with an ethical and spiritual intensity. His images are not documents in the bureaucratic sense—they are propositions in moral philosophy. Salgado let his images speak—and I listened.
One such body of work—his haunting images of the gold miners at Serra Pelada—has appeared in two distinct yet interlinked contexts. Initially featured in Workers (1993), these photographs were situated within a broader global meditation on the vanishing forms of manual labour. Decades later, Salgado revisited this site in Gold (2019), a dedicated monograph that offered a deeper, more contemplative immersion. While the subject remained the same, the editorial shift was profound: Workers framed Serra Pelada within the archive of global labour history, whereas Gold elevated it into an almost mythic allegory of human striving, exhaustion, and the metaphysical absurdity of extraction. The difference between them is not simply one of format but of philosophical inflection.
The Burden of the Frame: Salgado and the Documentary Inheritance
To grasp the stakes of Salgado’s work, it is essential to contextualise it within the more extended history of the documentary tradition. From the reformist visual rhetoric of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) to the state-building imaginaries of John Grierson’s documentary films, the documentary image has historically been harnessed to national narratives and technocratic reason. As John Tagg compellingly argues in The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning, the so-called “truth” of photography has often functioned less as a revelation than as a disciplinary mechanism—constructing subjects as objects of surveillance, pity, or intervention.
Tagg’s critique is incisive: the Griersonian-FSA frame, which cast the photographer as the moral witness and the subject as the passive recipient of institutional gaze, remains structurally intact in contemporary photojournalism. Salgado’s early projects—such as Workers (1993) and Migrations (2000)—risk reproducing this asymmetry. His sublime compositions, often shot from an elevated or panoramic perspective, aestheticise mass suffering in ways that hover perilously close to spectacle. Though Salgado differs from the statistical abstraction of neoliberal visuality, he is nonetheless bound, at times, to a frame that over represents the photographer’s voice and underrepresents the subject’s agency.
Tagg thus presses for the reconstitution of what he calls “a new archivist or of a new documentarian”—one who does not merely recirculate human suffering within a regime of visibility sanctioned by the state or global capital but ruptures the epistemological frame itself. This critical turn—toward a counter-archive of dissent—remains one of the unfulfilled challenges for photographers like Salgado. Despite his undeniable empathy and visual eloquence, his work often stops short of radically redistributing the means of narrative production.
From Witnessing to Relation: Azoulay and the Civil Contract of Photography
If Tagg alerts us to the structural asymmetries of the documentary frame, Ariella Azoulay offers a proposal for its political reimagining. In The Civil Contract of Photography, Azoulay calls on us to consider photography not merely as a product or representation but as an ongoing relation—a contract—between photographer, subject, and viewer. For Azoulay, the photographed person is not an object of knowledge or pity but a fellow citizen whose image calls us into a shared political space. The state does not authorise this civil contract; it is enacted by the viewing public’s ethical responsibility to the rights and presence of the imaged subject.
This is where Salgado’s work becomes both exemplary and insufficient. On the one hand, his images—especially in Migrations—make visible the lives of those rendered invisible by border regimes, economic dispossession, and environmental degradation. They call on viewers to recognise these individuals not as abstract “others” but as co-participants in a planetary condition. On the other hand, Salgado does not fully relinquish authorial control. His images are rarely dialogical; they do not invite the subject to speak back, nor do they often reflect their production conditions.
What would it mean for Salgado—or those who come after him—to embrace the photograph as a nonessential secular contract between citizens? It would mean accepting that the photographic act is always partial, always situated. It would require foregrounding the conditions of visibility, authorship, and consent. It would entail shifting from the rhetoric of the global moral witness to that of the co-citizen in an unfinished democratic encounter.
Aestheticism and the Ethical Sublime
Salgado’s images are frequently marked by what might be called the ethical sublime—a visual grammar that renders suffering monumental, often through large-format black-and-white prints with high contrast and dramatic scale. This sublimity has provoked admiration and critique in equal measure. Admirers view it as a way of bestowing dignity on the dispossessed. Detractors, however, argue that the beauty of the image risks eclipsing the pain it seeks to expose. The spectacle, in other words, overwhelms the substance.
This is the central ambivalence of Salgado’s work. He is drawn to the margins—workers, refugees, Indigenous peoples—but renders them through an aesthetic frame that occasionally reproduces the hierarchies he seeks to critique. Tagg reminds us that photography’s truth claim is always mediated, always framed by institutional logic. Salgado resists these logics—but not always consistently. His work often seems caught between the desire to bear witness and the need to compose a visually majestic image.
From elegy to ecology, Salgado’s later work gestures toward an ethics of repair. Salgado’s Genesis (2013) marks a significant shift in tone and epistemology. Where his earlier work documented the deformations of the human condition, Genesis turns to landscapes, wildlife, and Indigenous cultures that remain—at least visually—untouched by modernity. Some critics saw this as an escapist turn: a retreat from politics into pristine nature. But when read alongside his ecological initiative Instituto Terra, Genesis emerges as an attempt to perform a politics of repair.
The reforestation of Brazil’s Atlantic Forest is not a symbolic act; it is a literal intervention in the life world. Together, the images and the institution propose that the camera can also be a tool of restoration—not just of memory but of soil, air, and water. In this sense, Salgado begins to approximate what Tagg calls the “new documentarian”—not merely chronicling catastrophe but participating in its undoing.
Image as Epistemology
To understand the contemporary condition is not only to grasp political events or economic systems but to reckon with the regimes of visibility that sustain them. Images do not merely illustrate reality; they participate in its construction. In this sense, Salgado’s photographs are not just records of the world’s injustices or wonders—they are constitutive of how they are recognised. His work foregrounds the politics of framing, of who is seen and how. As Ariella Azoulay has argued, the photograph is never merely a window onto an event but a political relationship. Salgado’s wide-angle tableaux refuse reduction; they demand that the viewer dwell, not skim. They resist the tweetification of trauma.
But here lies the paradox: Salgado’s aesthetic grandeur can deepen and flatten awareness. By making suffering sublime, does he risk neutralising its urgency? Is the aesthetic distance he creates also a moral distance? Or is this distance precisely what allows for contemplation, for a refusal of the instant gratification that defines much of contemporary visual culture?
There are no easy answers. What is clear is that Salgado’s work destabilises the comfort of looking. Whether portraying the scorched earth of Kuwaiti oil fields (Kuwait, 1991), the gold miners of Serra Pelada (Workers), or the ice fields of Antarctica (Genesis), he insists that the world is not to be consumed but encountered. His photographs are not commodities of spectacle but conduits of disquiet. They do not allow us to say, “I know,” but force us to ask, “What does this mean—and what is required of me in knowing it?”
Toward a Politics of Witness
In a time when images are instantaneous and ubiquitous, Salgado’s analogue sensibility is a form of resistance. He works slowly, travels extensively, and prints meticulously. This slowness is not a nostalgic attachment to an earlier craft mode but a political ethic. It affirms that some stories require time and that some wounds cannot be digitised.
The role of the image in the contemporary condition is not merely to document but to disrupt—to rupture the smooth surface of indifference. Salgado’s work insists on this. In bearing witness, he offers images and calls forth an audience—a moral community of the seeing. His legacy is not only that of a photographer but that of a chronicler of the Anthropocene, a visual historian of displacement, a reluctant mystic of the earth. His work is elegiac and insurgent, lyrical and accusatory.
Salgado’s laborious, analogue practice is a political statement in a world saturated by digital images and instantaneous circulation. It asserts that some forms of suffering, some landscapes of ruin or resilience, require time, attention, and care. But as both Tagg and Azoulay insist, time and care are insufficient. What is needed is a new relational ethics—one that does not fetishise the image but understands it as part of an unfinished encounter between the visible and the just.
Salgado himself has stated: “I try with my pictures to raise a question, provoke a debate so that we can discuss our problems together, and come up with solutions.” This declaration is not mere sentiment—it gestures toward a civic role for photography, an aspiration to forge public discourse through visual witnessing. Yet the very structure of that visuality—its framing, aestheticism, and authorship—must be interrogated if the debate is to be more than catharsis for the viewer. The image is not the end of meaning but its provocation. It is an invitation, not a conclusion.
To look at a Salgado photograph is to confront a profound dilemma: the beauty of what it is, the horror of how it came to be, and the question of what we owe to those who stare back at us across the threshold of the frame.
Photography today oscillates between the forensic and the algorithmic, the archival and the viral. In this volatile terrain, Salgado’s legacy is ambiguous. He is neither a naïve moralist nor a cynical image-broker. Rather, he occupies the fraught middle space of the witness—one who sees and renders but must also interrogate the limits of his seeing. He offers not answers but openings.
Narendra Pachkhédé is a critic and writer who splits his time between Toronto, London and Geneva.