Salgado: “Scent of a Dream”

Started in 2002, when Sebastião Salgado and illy met, Scent of a dream is a photographic journey through coffee growing countries: the greatest  artistic reference ever produced on the coffee world. The project is based on a shared common value: sustainable development, the fundamental principal by which the Trieste-based company is able to maintain its supreme quality.
Throughout his career, Salgado has managed to use his black and white pictures to celebrate the daily lives of those on the plantations, and the beauty of the terroir from which the precious bean is grown and harvested. The sequence of his images was constructed, shot by shot, in ten of the countries from which illy buys coffee: Brazil, India, Indonesia, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Colombia, China, Costa Rica, El Salvador and Tanzania.

With the collaboration of Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation Scent of a Dream was on Show in Venice, at the Foundation’s gallery in Piazza San Marco. The exhibition consists of a selection of 75 of the most representative images from the great maestro’s photographic journey.
Scent of a dream is also a book, curated by Lélia Wanick Salgado, the photographer's wife,  where the stunning images of places and people are accompanied by the profound text  provided by Andrea Illy, Luis Sepulveda, Angela Vettese and of course, Sebastião Salgado.

The incredible Scent of a Dream images have been presented beyond the Venice exhibit through an extensive tour to the public at large in 2015 that included also the Coffee Cluster curated by illy inside Expo 2015 Milan.

Salgado was born in 1944 in Minas Gerais, one of Brazil’s major coffee growing regions, he found work as an economist for the International Coffee Organization.  But photography went from avocation to calling, and in 1973, Salgado started a career in images by documenting the lives of poor, migrant workers in Latin America and Africa.