Over the course of 50 years, the Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado has traveled to more than 120 countries, creating lasting images of events like the Kuwait oil fires and the Rwandan genocide, as well as capturing the humanity of workers, migrants and Indigenous communities worldwide. Yet this man, who was seemingly born to take photographs, nearly quit his vocation right at the height of his powers – following his firsthand experiences of the genocide in Rwanda, Salgado became so depressed by what he had witnessed that he felt that he could not go on.
“During the genocide in Rwanda,” Salgado told the Guardian, “I was doing a book about exodus – migration. What I saw there was so violent that I became sick. I felt depression, my health was not well. I went to see a doctor-friend, who told me ‘you’re dying, you must stop what you’re doing.’ So I stopped, I went to Brazil, and I made a decision to abandon photography and to become a peasant and work the land.”
