#2072 - Sebastião Salgado

Workers install a new wellhead to enable the injection of a chemical mud to "kill the old well." Greater Burhan, Kuwait, 1991
August 31, 2026
#2072 - Sebastião Salgado

Some photographs are difficult to look at, but impossible to forget. Sebastião Salgado traveled to Kuwait in the aftermath of the Gulf War, where hundreds of oil wells burned day and night, turning the desert into what he described as "a Dantean landscape." Through the smoke and darkness, his lens never lost sight of the extraordinary courage of the men who stood against the inferno. It is a photograph of catastrophe, certainly, but even more so, one of resilience.