Sebastião Salgado Exhibition in Pistoia Documents the World's Dispossessed

A major exhibition of Sebastião Salgado's photography has opened in Pistoia, Italy, running until July 26 across two venues: Palazzo dei Vescovi and Palazzo Buontalenti. The show features 180 works by the Brazilian photographer (born Aimorés, 1944), who has documented the world's most vulnerable people along migration routes, famine zones, and war fronts. Following the long coronavirus emergency, the exhibition reopens to the public. Salgado's images span Africa, the Middle East, Indochina, the Balkans, and South America, capturing recurring human tragedies—mass migrations, genocide in Rwanda, civil war in former Yugoslavia, the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, and favelas in São Paulo. His black-and-white photography avoids aestheticism or spectacle, instead conveying the dust of deserts, thirst of long marches, and daily anguish of unstable futures. The photographer stated, 'We cannot afford to look the other way.' The exhibition is part of Pistoia's ongoing contemporary photography program, following George Tatge. Salgado's work is presented as both anthropological and sacred, documenting humanity's resilience while implicitly critiquing the economic and political systems that allow such suffering.