Sebastião Salgado’s photo of the South Sandwich Islands, taken in 2009 Sebastião Salgado Sebastião Salgado became famous for his portraits of humans struggling to survive in an unjust and violent world. He took astonishing photographs of the attempted assassination of US President Ronald Reagan, covered conflicts in Africa, the Balkans and the Middle East, and documented the lives of labourers and migrants in years-long, globe-spanning projects. But after photographing the Rwandan genocide, Salgado became depressed, retreating to his family farm in Brazil. Dismayed by the environmental destruction he found, he began restoring the Atlantic rainforest there, which eventually inspired him to return to photography. The Genesis project followed, to capture “what was pristine and hadn’t been destroyed” on the planet, as Selgado said in a 2024 interview, from the mountains of Alaska to the Indigenous peoples of the Amazon. These travels turned him into an environmentalist, Salgado said in another interview. Glaciers, published this month following Salgado’s death last year, collects 65 of the black-and-white shots of glaciers and other ice the photographer took for …