A major exhibition of Sebastião Salgado’s photographs will take place in Italy one year after his death

One year after the death of the great Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado, his photographs are coming to Italy in a retrospective that promises to be one of the most significant exhibitions ever staged in the country. From 24 October 2026 to 4 April 2027, Bassano del Grappa's Civic Museum will host 'Photographs from the Maison Européenne de la Photographie Collection, Paris', an exhibition organised by the Municipality and Civic Museums of Bassano del Grappa and the MEP. It will bring together 160 photographs to showcase his artistic and human legacy. Curated by Pascal Hoël, the exhibition is structured as a sequence of visual themes arranged in chronological order across two sections. The first section is a reconstruction of the artist's best-known cycles, aiming to convey the coherence of a vision that has explored the relationships between people, work, nature, and global transformations for over fifty years.

From the images of the Serra Pelada gold mines to the migrations documented in Africa and Asia, up to the landscapes of the Genesis series, the exhibition will highlight a photographic practice developed through long-term projects, oscillating between times and geographies, where the image is part of a broader construction—an “open-air workshop” of observation of the world and a form of direct experience of the relationship between humans and landscape.

The photographs of Latin America, of the famines in the Sahel, as well as those documenting migrations in Exodus, build a grammar of movement made of waiting, crossings, and immersions that transforms the photographic act into a practice of proximity. A significant section is devoted to Salgado’s more recent projects, in which he shifted his focus toward the planet’s untouched territories, whose narratives capture vast valleys, rivers, and forests still preserved by nature, and whose protection deeply affected him through the projects of the Instituto Terra, founded in 1998 with his wife Lélia Wanick.

Trained as an economist, Salgado turned to photography in the early 1970s, following an international professional experience in Africa, where he decided to abandon his career in economics to devote himself entirely to photography, recognizing it as a more powerful tool for conveying the complexity of reality. 

In Bassano, this biographical dimension is not treated as a simple background but instead becomes a key to interpreting his entire body of work and the very foundation on which the exhibition is built: “When I take a photograph, I bring into play my entire cultural, human, and social heritage,” Salgado once said. “It is my life, my personality, my way of seeing the world that interacts with what I photograph. It is through all of this, and through my perception, that I am able to compose an image. A photograph is taken in a fraction of a second, but an entire lifetime is needed to create it”.

Exhibition: Photographs from the collection of the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris Curated by: Pascal Hoël Where: Bassano del Grappa Civic Museum, Bassano del Grappa, Italy Dates: October 24, 2026, through April 4, 2027