Sebastião Salgado – a giant of our time

“The art of landscape-painting could never have been born in the Sahara.” (Trotsky)

“I'm no artist at all, I'm a photographer.” (Sebastião Salgado)

[Originally published in Portuguese at marxismo.org.br]

On 23 May, Brazilian photographer Sebastião Ribeiro Salgado Júnior, known as Tião, passed away. The world has lost a great photographer, and gained an artistic icon of both Brazilian and universal significance. As Italo Calvino once said, such artists “... have a particular influence when they impose themselves as unforgettable and also when they hide in the folds of memory, blending into the collective or individual unconscious.” There is no doubt that the cultural and historical legacy left by Sebastião Salgado is of such magnitude. The photographer has now become a giant – and we see further because we have stood on his shoulders.

Recognised throughout the four corners of the globe, Salgado was a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris and received dozens of awards throughout his career. Among them, the Jabuti Award for journalism stands out. This was awarded to Salgado in 1998 for the book Terra – dedicated to Brazil’s Landless Peasants Movement (MST) – created in partnership with José Saramago, Nobel Prize winner for literature in 1998, and Chico Buarque de Holanda, a Brazilian composer and internationally renowned writer. Salgado was also awarded the Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts in October 1998.

Born on 8 February 1944, on a farm in the countryside of Minas Gerais, Brazil, Sebastião spent his early years deeply connected to nature and the simplicity of rural life – though, as his father would say, without any financial hardship. Still very young, he moved to the small town of Aimorés, in Minas Gerais. But rather than settle for the confines of a coffee farm or a small town, Sebastião set out to explore the world – he sought, as the poet José Régio put it, the distant and the mirage, the abysses, the torrents, the deserts.

He knew that the art of landscape-painting is not born in the desert; experience and theory were indelible marks of Sebastião’s journey. He left the Brazilian countryside and traveled to more than 120 countries over the course of his career, ventured into the unexplored, encountered hundreds of peoples, witnessed pain, death, beauty – and captured, through his images, the deepest human emotions.

In his teenage years, he studied in Vitória, in the state of Espírito Santo, and his education began to take shape. In an interview with Drauzio Varella in 2016, the photographer recalled the formative shocks of his youth and explained that the first event that had a major impact on him was moving to the city from a rural area. 35 families lived together on his father’s farm, but according to Sebastião, everyone lived in similar conditions: everyone had a house, the children went to the same school, and they ate, more or less, the same food – they coexisted on an equitable basis.

In Vitória, Espírito Santo, the reality was completely different. A major rural exodus was underway, driven by the arrival of automobile companies in Brazil, and Sebastião was confronted with the cruelty of class society. He worked as a mechanic’s assistant for Ford and later in a bookstore to supplement his income, since his father couldn’t cover all the costs of staying in the big city. Soon Sebastião began to open his eyes to the social disparity and inequality all around the world. He realized that the rural exodus – often involving extremely poor people moving to the cities – was essentially leading to the formation of the Brazilian proletariat on a mass scale.

It was in Vitória that he joined his first leftist groups and got to know the political parties. He earned a degree in Economics from the Federal University of Espírito Santo. During this time, he met his wife, Lélia – his lifelong partner and collaborator in his projects – and also became acquainted with Marxism.

Experience and theory were indelible marks of Sebastião’s journey / Image: Javier Perez Montes, Wikimedia Commons

Lélia and Sebastião moved to São Paulo. Sebastião pursued a master’s degree at the University of São Paulo (USP), at the Institute for Economic Research (IPE). At the time, only twenty people were selected for the programme, and upon completing it, they would immediately join the company of prominent economists both in Brazil and internationally. In that period, there was an urgent need for political experts and specialists in all fields.

Major figures in Brazilian politics attended the university at that time. Salgado met a number of prominent figures through his activism in university, such as José Dirceu, who went on to be a prominent member of the Workers’ Party (PT). At USP, he was actively involved in political organisations.

Over the course of his life, he was a member of two political organizations: Ação Popular in the 1960s, and the Aliança Libertadora Nacional, whose main leader was Carlos Marighella – a name that would later help him when he was in Ethiopia and managed to gain the trust of rebel leaders by saying he knew Marighella.

“[I was with] a group of refugees in northern Ethiopia… which had been a war zone for a long time… I ended up staying there for over three months and travelled all over. They really prevented me [from taking photographs] at first – there’s a very interesting story about that… The Tigray Left movement… was a very radical movement, a politically radical leftist group. They really kept me isolated [from their activities]. One day they were in a small meeting, a party summit, and I saw that they had a little book – when I looked at the little book… [it was] Guerrilla Tactics, Guerrilla Warfare… by Marighella. I said, ‘Hey, I’m from Brazil, I knew the man’ – I started talking to them… it was from that moment that I was able to start doing photography there...”

In an interview with Estadão, he said that he helped finance the political organisation he was part of, through his work as an economist.

During the fight against the military dictatorship in Brazil, he and Lélia decided to leave the country and move to France – a more or less forced exile, as he used to say. In other words, he left Brazil before the consequences of his political activism became irreversible.

“There came a time when it was necessary to either leave Brazil or go underground. It was a very harsh moment. After AI-5 [when most civil rights were suspended by the dictatorship] in December 1968, the situation became very tough and very tense. Repression was very harsh in Brazil…”

He completed his doctorate in Paris, at the University of Paris (the Sorbonne).

For the young economist, arriving in France was a special moment. Neither he nor his partner had a scholarship, so they worked to support themselves at a student cooperative, where he unloaded trucks while she worked at the cash register.

Sebastião emphasised that he had to study intensely because he was enrolled in one of the most difficult courses at the university at the time. He explains that the course was very demanding because it involved applying mathematical models to economics.

Even so, Sebastião and Lélia participated in Marxist study groups – it was France in 1969, and that was simply inevitable. This education is what Salgado considered the defining element of his work:

“... my fellow photographers were excellent – they framed shots very well and all – but they couldn’t place themselves within a historical perspective of the society they lived in… I had the ability to do a quick analysis of society, of the economy, and I had a capacity for synthesis…”

Salgado explained that his training, the impact of his background in economics and his political education were what gave his work as a photographer a sense of ideological integrity.

In France, he began a promising job as an economist for the International Coffee Organisation (ICO). It was through this work that he started traveling the world.

During his doctorate, Sebastião changed course. Through his wife – who was studying architecture at the School of Fine Arts and had bought a camera – Sebastião looked through the lens for the first time – at a beetle – and said that it changed his life. Three years after that fateful day, he began to dedicate himself to this new profession, which thrilled him far more than the economic reports of his previous field.

It is very clear in his interviews that he was fully aware that his educational background was what allowed him to see the world differently and to capture such striking moments in history. Clearly Sebastião Salgado’s work was guided by a central point: a profound love for humanity. There is no doubt about that – and even when he claimed to feel hopeless about humanity, he could not hide his deep affection. His work echoes the very cry of the Paris Commune: “We are here for humanity” – a direct influence of his understanding of Marxism, which he was fully conscious of.

Even though his work never strayed from its concern for the world’s oppressed and from his love for humanity, Salgado’s political convictions grew confused over time / Image: Fernando Frazão/Agência Brasil, Wikimedia Commons

Even though his work never strayed from its concern for the world’s oppressed and from his love for humanity, Salgado’s political convictions grew confused over time. From supporting guerilla warfare, to becoming an ecologist, to placing his faith in bourgeois institutions and losing his belief in social transformation – his political trajectory and views were contradictory, perhaps irreconcilably so, but can be understood by looking at his work and achievements. Alone, without a political organisation, Salgado witnessed and recorded the Brazilian dictatorship, hunger, death, war, struggle, disease, atrocities of every kind, and also large-scale environmental degradation. In 1999 he wrote:

“Maybe our reflection should begin here: with the fact that our survival is under threat. The New Millennium is just a date on the calendar of one of the major religions, but it can be an opportunity for us to take stock. We hold the key to the future of humanity, but to use it, we must understand the present. These photographs show part of that present. We cannot afford to look away.”

What’s certain is that, from a very early age, Salgado had a worldview attentive to social problems, and he knew he had to face the great events of history head-on. As Engels explained about Feuerbach, isolation limits us in every way:

“It was Feuerbach himself who did not go ‘forwards’ here; in the social domain, who did not get beyond his standpoint of 1840 or 1844. And this was again chiefly due to this reclusion which compelled him, who, of all philosophers, was the most inclined to social intercourse, to produce thoughts out of his solitary head instead of in amicable and hostile encounters with other men of his calibre.”

Sebastião Salgado was willing, throughout his career, to socialise – even without a party. If the man Sebastião was, at times, politically confused or disheartened, his work is unquestionably combative – it does not engage in a sterile or didactic combat, but a combat with perspective, a combat rooted in human beauty, in the human race, in human strength. With a deep technical mastery and a staggering knowledge of the world, the spirit of Sebastião blossoms uniquely in each image – a genius of photography. His work is a cry for our class, the working class. His art belongs to the oppressed of the world and proves that we have no borders, that it is the system that oppresses – whether in Brazil, in Bolivia, or in Ethiopia.

Two great phases

Like the great figures in the history of journalism and photography, who produced works of unparalleled artistic value – such as Hemingway, John Reed, or the photographer Robert Capa – Sebastião wanted to be where the heart beat strongest. He spared no effort in getting to know each place he visited in depth, both from a historical point of view – since he was a tireless scholar – and to share in the life with the people of every place he photographed. He worked alongside renowned figures in photography such as Eric Lessing, George Rodger, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Peter Marlow, and many others. There was no shortage of notable examples around him.

Sebastião Salgado’s body of work can be divided into two great phases. The first phase was that of a man well-versed in history, in class struggle, in Marxism, certain that it is the workers who move the world and determined to record the lives and suffering of these people for all time, sustained by an unshakable faith in humanity.

A second phase was that of a man marked by what he saw throughout life and, in some way, gripped by the uncertainty that our fate may be barbarism. Fundamentally, Sebastião Salgado spoke of war as the most painful and despair-inducing aspect of life. Like Argentine singer Mercedes Sosa, he shared the belief that war “is a big monster and it stomps hard / on all the poor innocence of the people.”

Whether in the phase guided by perspective, something which he also expressed in his words, or in the phase of hopelessness, his work is spectacular. He was a learned man, with a singular gaze on every human issue – like the Roman playwright Terence, nothing human was alien to him.

In his more disheartened phase, we might say Sebastião reached his technical apex; his work represented the meeting point between technique and poetry, as described in Mexican poet Octavio Paz’ work The Bow and the Lyre. He was the Caravaggio of world photography.

He became world-renowned as the photographer of black and white – or, as he himself liked to say, the photographer of abstraction. When he began photography in the 1970s, he carried out several projects in colour, but over time he developed a very distinctive approach to black and white.

After working on an assignment for Life magazine in the late 1980s, covering the anniversary of the Russian Revolution, he decided to photograph exclusively in black and white. A connoisseur of all photographic techniques and the entire production process, Sebastião kept pace with technological evolution and incorporated digital tools into his work, remaining at the forefront of photography. In our view, he reaches his peak with Genesis, in which the poetry of photography is fully refined.

If Salgado himself held little hope in the final years of his career, the power of his work will go on providing a perspective for the future. It shows human strength as never before seen in photography, and in a way that unifies the oppressed – all of humanity.

Workers of the world!

When Sebastião learned that Portugal had overthrown the Estado Novo dictatorship in the Carnation Revolution, he didn’t think twice. Along with Lélia and their four-month-old son, he went from Paris to Portugal to document the days following the Revolution. In the special report “Flowers in Rifles – 50 Years of the Carnation Revolution” (2024), Salgado states that it was during the Portuguese Revolution that he learnt what it meant to photograph and produce journalistic reports. Portugal, for him, became a school of photojournalism. From that point on, such major projects would define Salgado’s work.

In his first major personal project, Other Americas (1986), he documented the lives of peasants and indigenous peoples across Latin America between 1977 and 1984. Alan Riding, in the preface to Other Americas, reflects on how Salgado’s photography constructs a different geography for the Americas – the images show alternative dividing lines, more delicate ones, sometimes vanishing, that unify far more than they separate. These are lines drawn by capital, not territorial boundaries, but the poverty and suffering endured by the peoples of the continent.

The denunciation of the poverty imposed on these populations is the project’s core purpose. Riding explains that Sebastião broke away from romanticised views of indigenous life and connects the rural worker to the indigenous question, analysing the depth of the images through Salgado’s perspective. The scope of the project is described by the photographer himself:

“I journeyed through the universality of this isolated world, traveling from the torrid coastlines of northeastern Brazil to the mountains of Chile, and from there to Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Mexico.”

In Sahel: The End of the Road (1986) – created in partnership with the humanitarian organisation Doctors Without Borders – Salgado depicts drought and famine in countries like Ethiopia, Mali, and Sudan. This was one of the most impactful works of Salgado’s career, in which he followed the journey of people migrating from Ethiopia to Sudan in search of food and water.

On this journey, he witnessed parents burying their children due to malnutrition and starvation. He saw infectious diseases ravaging populations – diseases that had already been eradicated in other parts of the world. This journey convinced him that what he wanted to photograph was the struggle for life, the resistance of the people.

The depth of Sebastião’s studies led him to write about polio – Brazil was the first country in the world to eradicate the disease, and yet Sebastião later saw it claim the lives of thousands of children across the globe. Sebastião’s The End of Polio contains a foreword by former UN General Secretary Kofi Annan: “Protecting a child from polio is as easy as shielding that child from the rain — it means opening the medical equivalent of an umbrella.” Sebastião was keenly aware that what was killing an entire population was the system itself – and beyond documenting it in photographs, he issued a political manifesto against the neglect of a simple act that could save thousands of lives.

In his project Workers, he portrays the gold miners of Serra Pelada, sugarcane cutters, dock workers, miners, and shipyard laborers.

Taken between 1986 and 1992, the images offer more than just a historical record – they show that it is the workers who play the central role in building the world. The photographs include scenes of gold miners in Serra Pelada, Brazil; tuna fishermen in Sicily; dam builders in India; and even workers fighting fires in oil wells in Kuwait. A week before his death, Sebastião Salgado spoke about the exhibition of this work, which was set to open the following week. He stated:

“I had to pay tribute to this work that was in my heart, which was the reason for my political activism and for what I believed to be the world of production.”

This was a joint project made together with his wife Lélia:

“With Lélia, we made the decision that we would carry out a project based on Marx’s theory of productive labour, which inspired me deeply... a portrait of the world of labour...”

We will focus here on the images of Serra Pelada in Brazil. This place was the largest open-pit gold mine in the world. Between 60,000 and 90,000 men are believed to have passed through there in search of wealth in the form of gold. The mining site operated from 1979 to 1992. Today, mining rights in the region belong to the Brazilian mining corporation Vale, one of the world’s largest mining companies. It was formerly known as Vale do Rio Doce before it was privatised in 1997. The company operated in the same region where Sebastião spent his childhood.

Although there is a specific project based on his images of this mine (Gold – Serra Pelada Gold Mine), which was only officially released in 2019, these photos had already inhabited the collective imagination of the Brazilian people for decades and were originally part of the project Workers.

Serra Pelada was Sebastião’s Inferno – Brazil’s living version of a Dantesque world. Sebastião spent approximately a month in Serra Pelada, exposed to the most harrowing conditions – including everything from disease to murder. Women were not allowed inside the mine, and in both photos and TV footage from the time, one can see only men, boys, the elderly, and men with disabilities – all working in subhuman conditions.

Under state supervision and with no rights whatsoever, the number of workers multiplied day after day, hoping to strike it rich in the hell that was Serra Pelada. Around the mining site were the women – some involved in food preparation and a range of informal trades, others engaging in prostitution. Sebastião was granted permission by the Brazilian government to photograph the site, but there were certain restrictions, as no women are featured in the collection of 56 photos.

Perhaps the images of Serra Pelada are the most complete expression of the impact Sebastião Salgado's work had in Brazil during the 1980s. It was nearly impossible for anyone with access to a television not to recognize Serra Pelada – such was the power of Salgado’s imagery. His photographs were broadcast on news programmes from the North to the South of the country.

In 2013, in an interview on the Jô Soares Show, Sebastião Salgado spoke about his time at the mining site. He discussed the indiscriminate use of mercury dumped into rivers, the intestinal infection he suffered from the heavy metal – which lasted nearly six months – and, above all, highlighted the subhuman working conditions endured by the miners.

Resistance, migration

When Sebastião returned to Brazil in 1997, he borrowed a car from one of his six sisters and set off on a journey to the North East, where he documented the lives of the people there. The photos show funerals, markets that sold everything from rental coffins to shoes, and the faces of a population that was both suffering and strong. Sebastião states in the documentary The Salt of the Earth (2014) that life and death walked very closely together there. Drought, rural exodus, and misery have been portrayed by many of Brazil’s greatest artists – it is a recurring theme in Brazilian art. Graciliano Ramos, the renowned Brazilian writer, captured the joy of imagining the possibility of food:

"At a bend in the road he spotted a fence corner, and hope filled him – maybe he’d find food – he felt like singing."

Candido Portinari gave us a painting: Migrants. Luiz Gonzaga sang of rural exodus, poverty, and deep sorrow:

“What a blaze, what a furnace

Not a single crop in the field

For lack of water I lost my cattle

My bay horse died of thirst…”

Sebastião Salgado entered history as the man who most powerfully photographed drought, hunger, and the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST). In his own way, he profoundly explained the movement – its emergence as a political force, as a combative impulse against the military dictatorship, born from human suffering.

“These are people with great moral strength, with great physical strength, though they are very weak, malnourished.”

Sebastião Salgado had a decades-long relationship with the MST – without a doubt, it was the Brazilian political organisation with which he maintained the closest ties throughout his career. Salgado’s involvement with the landless rural workers’ cause for the book Terra began in 1980, when the Movement had not yet been officially established – the MST’s first National Meeting would only take place in 1984, in the city of Cascavel, Paraná. The presence of rural workers without access to land in Brazil, however, dates back to the country’s colonisation and intensified under the military dictatorship, culminating in the emergence of the MST.

Sebastião photographed the Movement over 16 years during his visits to Brazil, and the result is the book Terra.

“The Landless Movement, to me, is almost the last retention valve for populations in the countryside, because it’s a phenomenon we see happening around the world today… And in Brazil, the MST is a very original movement, because it's very difficult to organise rural people, especially in such a large country like Brazil… Yet they managed to build an organisation that coordinates a large portion of these rural workers and fights with them for the possibility of remaining on the land, of having land… I came to tell that story, because that story is also a vital part of my work…”

In a letter to Sebastião’s family on 23 May 2025, the MST recalled the meaning of the book Terra:

“We occupied spaces of the working class – university hallways, subway stations, museums, art houses, streets, parks… All these places no longer held 'the wretched of the earth', but people building bridges so that dreams could become reality. And so, in each exhibition, there were the greatest humanist and socialist values, internationalism and class solidarity, conceived and materialised through the eyes of Sebastião, Lélia, Chico, and Saramago.”

The experience of entire populations in exodus is recounted in another way in the project Exodus (2000). Here, Salgado expands his scope to the global scale. Over six years, he traveled to more than 40 countries to document migrants, refugees, and displaced people. His photos reveal how the subjects of exodus are stripped not only of material goods, but also of identity, culture, and autonomy – reminding us of what Marx and Engels already explained in the Communist Manifesto, when they wrote: “All that is solid melts into air.”

It is in Exodus that Sebastião confronts the harshest reality his gaze could endure. Among the landmarks of this work is the 1994 genocide in Rwanda:

“The horror had reached such proportions that people were numb even to the idea of death.”

The consequences of what was one of the worst genocides of the 20th century did not end there. Sebastião followed its aftermath and, in 1997, returned to the region:

“...rebels backed by the Tutsi launched a successful offensive against Mobutu’s perpetual dictatorship, and hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees had fled into the Central African jungle. For some time, the rest of the world lost track of them. When I found them, the despair was total. Many – who knows how many – had been murdered, countless others had died from hunger and disease. Yet even so, the instinct to survive pushed them forward, fleeing.”

A turn toward nature

After witnessing the horrors of the genocide in Rwanda and the fratricidal war in the former Yugoslavia, Sebastião Salgado sank into a deep depression. His physical health deteriorated, and he even stopped photographing for a time. More than anything, he lost faith in social transformation. He began to believe that humanity is doomed, that barbarism is inevitable, and that our extinction as a species is only a matter of time.

The events that led Sebastião Salgado into despair culminated with the death of his parents. At that moment, the idea of reforesting the farm and the region where he had spent his early childhood emerged – an initiative led by his partner, Lélia. Thus was born the Instituto Terra – a protected, nonprofit natural reserve, that serves as an environmental reforestation project for the Brazilian Atlantic Forest.

Throughout his career, Sebastião was funded by companies, major press agencies, and was involved with NGOs focused on humanitarian programmes. However, his disillusionment with humanity led him to adopt a different political perspective. Until then, he had been a worker and a great artist who was paid for his work. After his moment of disillusionment with humanity’s future, he set up a non-governmental organisation which, in practice, assumed the responsibilities of the state, acting — as he himself said — with the help of everyone to heal the planet. In his mind, Earth would always remain.

It goes without saying that this turn in Salgado’s political trajectory warrants criticism.

His belief that humanity is condemned led him to Genesis.

In Genesis (2013) – which is themed around “the natural and primitive beauty of planet Earth” – he photographed Antarctica, the Amazon, African deserts, isolated tribes, and untouched forests. It is a work of unmatched sensitivity and breathtaking beauty. Revisiting the idea of seeking out new subjects for his photography, this project ventures into the unknown.

Sebastião Salgado was harshly criticised for the funding behind this project. As noted earlier, Sebastião’s political confusion brought certain contradictions – the 21st century marked a new phase in Salgado’s life. Here, the absence of hope in fundamental social transformation, expressed in his own words as “disbelief in humanity,” led him toward the natural world. Sebastião accepted funding from Vale – the private mining company responsible for the Mariana and Brumadinho disasters, in which catastrophic failures in mining projects led to hundreds of deaths.

In a 2019 interview, when asked whether he regretted accepting this funding, he replied no, and delivered a speech on the need to reconcile the public and private sectors. At the same time, he also criticised Vale, saying the company today is different from the one that funded him. Clearly, his political thinking in this period was highly contradictory.

Genesis was and remains Sebastião Salgado’s greatest project. Not only because it involved eight years of work traveling the world and photographing the planet’s most remote places, but also because it is intertwined with Instituto Terra.

In interviews, Sebastião and his wife Lélia describe how difficult this project was. Once again, regardless of our political critique of the form of this project, it clearly reveals the depth of Sebastião Salgado’s understanding of a range of fields including economics and the environment. Undeniably, the project is beautiful from an environmental standpoint. It leaves a legacy that proves the possibility of restoring nature through human action – but it also reveals a clear political idealism, placing our hopes in large-scale individual efforts, financed by the very entities responsible for the destruction (major corporations), rather than in the necessity for social transformation brought about by the masses.

In a way, Salgado’s later collection Amazônia is a continuation of Genesis. These are interconnected projects, combining photographic work with a concrete environmental effort: the Instituto Terra.

Legacy

Sebastião Salgado was, above all, a visual storyteller. His gaze reflected a deep empathy with the people he portrayed. Salgado did not photograph misery – he photographed the struggle for dignity, the striving for life. This view of humanity is a guide for communists.

We do not share the same political views as Salgado – neither his early ideas, such as his support for guerrilla movements, nor his belief in bourgeois institutions, which he maintained throughout his life, and least of all the view that the role of the state can be taken on the NGOs and volunteer work.

Our meeting point is with a man who produced one of history’s greatest collections of photographs – of undeniable aesthetic value – dedicated solely and exclusively to the oppressed of the world. His work was devoted to workers, to forgotten peoples, to those who suffer from war and oppression across the globe. With his passing, we have lost a great comrade of our cause: the struggle for social transformation and the construction of a society that Sebastião surely envisioned – one without oppressors and oppressed.

In this sense, and in a world where the decay of society is matched by the decay of art, we deeply mourn the loss of this genius of photography. We are certain that, as Engels once said of Balzac, we can learn more from the photographs of Sebastião Salgado about the need for social transformation than from hundreds of contemporary economists and historians.

Paraphrasing the poet Mário Quintana, Sebastião Salgado once said in an interview that he visited over 120 countries, but deep down he never really left the little town where he was born. He explained that he felt very connected to Brazil, but at the same time, that borders are an artificial construct: “We are all one – there are no differences between us. Our skin colour may vary a bit, you know, but what is essential to one is essential to the other, with only slight differences in the tongue we speak.”

He finished by explaining that during a months-long assignment in Indonesia, he stayed at a sulfur mine in a volcano, extracting sulfur every day alongside the workers. None of them spoke English or any language he could understand, and he didn’t speak a word of Javanese. Even so, they formed such a strong bond that, when the time came to say goodbye, tears became the universal language.

This is a beautiful example that brings us closer to this giant of Brazilian art – a living example of the rallying cry communists hold dear every day: “The workers have no country! Workers of the world, unite!”