SCENT OF
A DREAM

A journey through the world of coffee
with Sebastião Salgado

Our meeting with photographer Sebastião Salgado has borne fruit in the form of Scent of a Dream, the most significant report ever dedicated to the world of coffee.

Thanks to over 10 years of work, Salgado has succeeded in capturing the rhythms of everyday life on the plantations, immortalising it in black-and-white photos that also record the beauty of the lands where these precious beans are planted, grown and harvested. This voyage through images, organised step-by-step and shot-by-shot, takes us to ten of the different countries from which we purchase our coffee: Brazil, India, Indonesia, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Colombia, China, Costa Rica, El Salvador and Tanzania.

"Coffee is part of me, coffee is my life, coffee runs through my veins".

Sebastião Salgado

"Scent of a Dream" is a journey through coffee-growing countries that began in 2002, based on a shared, common value: sustainable development. For us here at illy, this is a principle of the utmost importance and the approach we have chosen to maintain our unbeatable quality.

"The idea was
to tell
the story of the people
who produce coffee".

Sebastião Salgado

Thanks to the collaboration of the Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation, Scent of a Dream was on display in Venice’s Piazza San Marco from 6 May to 27 September 2015, showcasing a selection of 75 of the most representative shots from the great maestro’s photographic journey. Scent of a Dream also exists in the form of a book edited by the photographer’s wife, Lélia Wanick Salgado. Here, images of the men, women and places of the coffee world are accompanied by the words of Andrea Illy, Luis Sepulveda, Angela Vettese and Sebastião Salgado himself

The images from Scent of a Dream were also presented to the wider public at the 2015 Milan Expo: in fact, the photographs were an integral part of the International Exhibition’s Coffee Cluster, which led visitors on a journey “from the field to the cup”.

Salgado was born in 1944 in Minas Gerais, Brazil’s coffee-growing region. After university, he moved to Paris and then London, where he worked as an economist for the International Coffee Organization. However, the strong calling he felt to tell stories through images soon became his path in life. In 1973 he began his career as a photographer, which would lead him to document the lives of Latin American and African farmers and their migrations.