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Sebastião Salgado’s Leica R6:
The Camera That Witnessed the Inferno in Kuwait
Michal Kosakowski, Leo Häusler-Dworschak (YIELD)
Sebastião Salgado (1944–2025) was one of the defining documentary photographers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Across landmark projects including Workers, Migrations, Genesis and Amazônia, he developed a visual language that combined human endurance, social reality and environmental transformation with extraordinary formal power. His photographs were exhibited and published around the world and became central to the canon of modern documentary photography.
Few objects can bring collectors quite as close to that history as a camera used in the creation of one of Salgado’s most celebrated bodies of work. At Leitz Photographica Auction 49 on 28 November 2026, we will offer such an object: the Leica R6 Salgado personally used while documenting the burning oil fields of Kuwait in 1991.
A study of labour, resilience and destruction
The Kuwait series was created in the closing stages of the Gulf War. As Iraqi forces withdrew from Kuwait in early 1991, around 700 oil wells were set ablaze or severely damaged, transforming large areas of the desert into an almost apocalyptic landscape of fire, crude oil and black smoke. International firefighting teams began the enormous task of bringing the wells under control in March. The last burning well was finally extinguished in November 1991, after roughly eight months of continuous work.
Sebastião Salgado / Fallen Worker - Kuwait 1991
Salgado travelled to Kuwait to witness the catastrophe firsthand and stayed close to the firefighters working among the burning wells. Conditions were extraordinary. Flames rose high above the desert, dense clouds of soot frequently blocked out the sun and pools of crude oil covered the ground. The landscape remained dangerous not only because of the fires and toxic fumes but also because of unexploded ordnance left behind by the war. The heat was so intense that, according to Salgado’s later recollections, even his photographic equipment suffered under the extreme conditions.
Sebastião Salgado / Worker - Kuwait 1991
Yet Salgado's photographs are concerned with more than the sheer scale of the environmental disaster. At their centre are the firefighters themselves: figures drenched in oil and water, dwarfed by towering flames and industrial structures, struggling against forces that appear almost elemental. The subject fitted naturally into the larger project on which Salgado had already been working for several years – an examination of physical labour and of forms of manual work that were disappearing as the industrial world changed.
The resulting photographs first appeared in The New York Times Magazine in 1991 and quickly became recognised as one of Salgado’s most compelling and courageous series. In 1992, they earned him the Leica Oskar Barnack Award, given for photography exploring the relationship between humanity and the environment. It was Salgado’s second Barnack Award, following his first in 1985.
The Kuwait photographs subsequently became part of Salgado's monumental Workers: An Archaeology of the Industrial Age, first published in 1993. Structured around subjects including agriculture, mining, industry, construction and oil, Workers became one of the defining photographic studies of manual labour of its generation. More than two decades later, in 2016, the Kuwait photographs received their own dedicated monograph, Kuwait: A Desert on Fire.
The camera behind the photographs
At the centre of the ensemble offered at Leitz Photographica Auction 49 is Leica R6 no. 1747647, used by Salgado in Kuwait together with the Leica Macro-Elmarit-R 2.8/60mm no. 3390243 for a substantial part of the series.
The mechanically controlled Leica R6 was particularly well suited to the direct, physically demanding way Salgado worked. In Kuwait, however, both photographer and equipment were exposed to conditions far beyond those encountered in ordinary photographic practice: extreme heat, desert sand, oil, soot and smoke. The signs of use visible on the camera today therefore form part of its history as a working photographic instrument rather than simply a camera that once belonged to a celebrated photographer.
After Salgado's return from Kuwait, the camera was overhauled and repaired by Leica and later exhibited at the Leica Gallery and Leica Museum in Solms. Its provenance and serial number had already been documented when it was offered at auction in 2005.
An exceptional collector’s item
The lot brings together several objects directly connected to this historic body of work. Alongside the Leica R6 are two original gelatin silver prints measuring 40 × 50 cm, each personally signed by Salgado and bearing his blind stamp. Completing the ensemble is a copy of the limited edition Workers, Artist’s Proof No. 7 of only 30 copies, containing numerous photographs made in Kuwait in 1991.
Together, camera, photographs and book trace different stages in the creation and reception of the series: from the instrument used by Salgado in Kuwait, through his original photographic prints, to the publication through which the images became part of the wider history of photography.
For collectors, this is therefore more than a camera with distinguished provenance. It is material evidence of the making of one of Sebastião Salgado's defining photographic series – an object that accompanied him amid the smoke, oil and fire of Kuwait and helped create images that, more than three decades later, remain among the most powerful documents of the environmental and human consequences of war.