For more than six decades, Lélia Wanick Salgado was the partner, collaborator and first believer behind one of the great documentary photographers of our time. A year after the death of her husband, Sebastião Salgado, in 2025, she has spoken to Vanity Fair Italia from her studio beside the Canal Saint-Martin in Paris, ahead of a major exhibition of his work in northern Italy.
A love built on distance and return
The couple shared 61 years together, and Lélia Wanick Salgado’s explanation for why it lasted is disarmingly honest: he travelled a great deal. She joined him on many assignments but not all of them, and she says the long absences made every homecoming feel like a celebration. What held them together, in her view, was having the same goals and treating each other’s way of thinking with respect.
She also reminds readers that the photographer might never have existed. Sebastião Salgado was a young economist with a promising career when he decided to swap it for a camera, a field he knew almost nothing about. She told him to go ahead, knowing they could lose everything. Her advice to anyone thinking of a similar leap is simple: be sure you truly want it, then try, because nobody should be bound for life by a choice made as a teenager. Asked to pick a single image to send into space, she chose a view of the Amazon, the series she returns to most often, as a way of saying that this is a planet worth protecting. The couple also founded Instituto Terra, an environmental foundation in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais.
Salgado in Bassano del Grappa
The exhibition, opening at the Museo Civico in Bassano del Grappa on 24 October 2026 and running until 4 April 2027, brings together more than 160 photographs from the collection of the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) in Paris. Curated by Pascal Hoël, the MEP’s head of collections, it follows his work in chronological order, from Other Americas, Sahel, Serra Pelada, Workers and Exodus to Genesis, his long tribute to the untouched corners of the planet. Many of the prints come from 105 originals the couple donated to the MEP in 2018. The show is also the first official event in Bassano’s bid to become Italian Capital of Culture 2029. Lélia Wanick Salgado says a full retrospective is planned in about two years, with the venue still to be chosen.
If the deep greens of the Amazon are your favourite part of the Salgado story, they translate beautifully into jewellery: an emerald pendant, a pair of peridot rings or the forest tones of diopside earrings. And for a long day in the galleries, a hands-free crossbody bag keeps the essentials close.
Sources: Vanity Fair Italia (19 October 2026); Musei Civici di Bassano del Grappa (museibassano.it); ANSA (16 June 2026). Featured photo: Edwin Malca Cerna via Pexels, converted to black and white.
