Sebastião Salgado

Brazil, August 2006
The indigenous community numbers about three hundred, living in the Aiha Kalapalo village on the banks of the Culuene River, a tributary of the Xingu River, in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso.
After a fishing trip, they devote themselves to smoking piranhas. The fish is then served to the guest on a wooden cutting board sprinkled with chambira vegetable salt, a spice obtained from the ashes of a particular palm leaf, along with a cassava tortilla. Now – after almost twenty years – I still associate that memory with the taste of that particular salty flavor.

I had gone to that remote region to document what remained of the rites and myths before they became a folkloristic event, but I hadn't considered that I would meet my "mythological hero" there in the flesh, the one I admired unreservedly as the greatest humanist photographer history has given us, the moral heir of Henri Cartier-Bresson.

To be honest, it wasn't the first time I'd seen him in person. Just five years earlier, I'd bumped into him at the crosswalk near the Panthéon in Paris, and we looked at each other the way a photographer looks at another photographer and recognizes each other when you discover that one of us is wearing a camera around our necks. Mine was attractive; it couldn't go unnoticed. As Bauhaus theory well explained, the design of an object must be capable of declaring its function: my black Leica M was a working tool, not a fetish, exactly like the Master's, with the difference that his had captured the most poetic and violent—often superhuman—images that contemporary history had presented to it. In Xingu, in that village, we almost never encountered each other during the day, when the sun was high. We only went out into the square in the early morning or towards evening, when the Indians gathered to celebrate the phases of the Kuarup, the funeral rite similar to our Day of the Dead, which lasts several days and nights uninterrupted.
Salgado always dressed in a khaki suit, hiding his square, angular face, reminiscent of an Easter Island menhir, beneath a wide-brimmed straw hat.
Although I recognized him immediately, out of shyness but also out of reverence, I chose to respect his work without intervening or advancing. I would have said banal, obvious things to him, and I avoided framing him with my lens precisely so as not to appear intrusive.

He was working on that majestic project called Genesis and later told me that he had already visited these places and the same context a year earlier.
He told me a few details as we walked together one evening to the lagoon behind the village to cool off, and I remember with emotion when, watching the butterflies grabbing our soap, he told me
that children playing in the water look like butterflies.
He added that the world he loved so much was changing too quickly, and this dismayed him.
How could I blame him?
We were surrounded by officials and foreigners who had flocked to the village in those days; There was also a BBC crew with four actors, all ready to film an episode of the TV series Survival.

On the last day, one morning, we photographed the huka huka fight shoulder to shoulder (as the images show). I tried not to follow his shots, out of modesty, I tried to look in the opposite direction. I didn't want to replicate his gaze piercing the lens; it was something he couldn't bear imitation. Today, when I look at one of his photographs taken on those same days and in those same places, a lump rises in my throat. I regret not having been more brazen, not having chatted more intensely with him. He is a great master.

I can still taste the salt in my mouth, a lingering taste because there was no drinking water to quench our thirst. I taste the tears I can't hold back as I think of that gentle, kind man who walked under the Xingu stars. So discreet, delicate, and quick in his shots, vibrant and swift as a hummingbird.

Text by Luca Periotto
Photos by Sebastião Salgado and Luca Periotto
NP June/July 2025