Sebastiao Salgado

From Lens to Land

Sebastiao Ribeiro Salgado is one of the most celebrated documentary photographers of the twentieth century. Born in 1944 in Aimores, a small town in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil, he grew up on a cattle ranch surrounded by lush Atlantic Forest. After studying economics and working briefly for the International Coffee Organization, Salgado turned to photography in the early 1970s. Over the next three decades, he traveled to over 100 countries, producing powerful black-and-white images of human labor, migration, and suffering that appeared in publications worldwide.

By the late 1990s, Salgado was emotionally and physically exhausted. Years of documenting genocide in Rwanda, famine in the Sahel, and displacement across the globe had taken a severe toll. When he returned to his family's ranch in Minas Gerais in 1998, he found that the landscape of his childhood had been destroyed. The once-forested hills were barren and eroded. Springs had dried up. The cattle ranch, ravaged by decades of deforestation and overgrazing, was a wasteland of exposed red earth.

Instituto Terra

It was Salgado's wife, Lelia Deluiz Wanick Salgado, who proposed the idea that would transform both the land and their lives. "Why don't we try to replant the forest?" she asked. Together, they founded Instituto Terra in 1998, a nonprofit organization dedicated to restoring the degraded Atlantic Forest ecosystem on and around the family property. The Atlantic Forest is one of the world's most biodiverse biomes and also one of the most threatened, with only about 12 percent of its original cover remaining.

The Salgados and their team began by establishing a nursery to grow native tree seedlings. Over the following years, they planted more than two million seedlings across roughly 1,500 acres of degraded land, using over 290 species of native trees. The work was painstaking and methodical. Each species was chosen for its role in the ecosystem, from pioneer species that could tolerate full sun and poor soil to climax species that would eventually form the mature canopy.

The results exceeded even their most optimistic projections. As the trees grew, springs that had been dry for decades began flowing again. More than 170 species of birds returned to the property, along with mammals, reptiles, and amphibians that had not been seen in the area for years. The restored forest became a corridor connecting fragments of remaining Atlantic Forest, allowing wildlife to move between isolated habitats.

A Second Act of Creation

Salgado has described the reforestation project as the most important work of his life. "Perhaps we have a solution," he has said. "There is a single being which can transform CO2 to oxygen, which is the tree. We need to replant the forest." The experience also reinvigorated his photography. His monumental project "Genesis," published in 2013, documented pristine landscapes and indigenous communities around the world, a celebration of the planet's remaining wild places that he approached with renewed purpose after seeing degraded land come back to life.

Instituto Terra has expanded beyond the Salgado family property to work with neighboring landowners and communities. The organization runs environmental education programs that have reached tens of thousands of students. It has developed expertise in native seedling production, watershed restoration, and ecological monitoring that is shared with other restoration projects across Brazil.

The transformation of the Salgado ranch from barren cattle land to thriving forest has become one of the most visible and inspiring examples of large-scale ecological restoration in the world. Wim Wenders' 2014 documentary "The Salt of the Earth," which profiles Salgado's photography and the Instituto Terra project, brought the story to millions of viewers. For Salgado, the forest is proof that environmental destruction is not irreversible. "The land was as sick as I was," he once said. "We healed together."