All SEBASTIAO SALGADO Quotes about “Photography”

“The picture is not made by the photographer, the picture is more good or less good in function of the relationship that you have with the people you photograph.”
“We are animals, born from the land with the other species. Since we've been living in cities, we've become more and more stupid, not smarter. What made us survive all these hundreds of thousands of years is our spirituality; the link to our land.”
“I don't believe a person has a style. What people have is a way of photographing what is inside them. What is there comes out.”
“It's more important for a photographer to have very good shoes, than to have a very good camera”
“I'm not an artist. An artist makes an object. Me, it's not an object, I work in history, I'm a storyteller.”
“I have a way to photograph. You work with space, you have a camera, you have a frame, and then a fraction of a second. It's very instinctive. What you do is a fraction of a second, it's there and it's not there. But in this fraction of a second comes your past, comes your future, comes your relation with people, comes your ideology, comes your hate, comes your love - all together in this fraction of a second, it materializes there.”
“I don't want anyone to appreciate the light or the palette of tones. I want my pictures to inform, to provoke discussion - and to raise money.”
“We live in a society where we never prepare people to be a community.”
“My way of photographing is my way of life. I photograph from my experience, my way of seeing things.”
“I am a former economist. I never went to photography school to learn photography.”
“We are one human race, and there must be understanding among all men. For those who look at the problems of today, my big hope is that they understand. That they understand that the population is quite big enough, that they must be informed that they must have economic development, that they must have social development, and must be integrated into all parts of the world.”
“Of course, I won't be abandoning photography, because it is my life.”
“I looked through a lens and ended up abandoning everything else.”
“I have been photographing the portrait of an end of an era, as machines and computers replace human workers. What we have in these pictures is an archeology.”
“When I was just starting out, I met Cartier-Bresson. He wasn't young in age but, in his mind, he was the youngest person I'd ever met. He told me it was necessary to trust my instincts, be inside my work, and set aside my ego. In the end, my photography turned out very different to his, but I believe we were coming from the same place.”
“I tell a little bit of my life to them, and they tell a little of theirs to me. The picture itself is just the tip of the iceberg.”
“I can be an artist a posteriori, not a priori. If my pictures tell the story, our story, human story, then in a hundred years, then they can be considered an art reference, but now they are not made as art. I'm a journalist. My life's on the road, my studio is the planet.”
“There comes a moment when it is no longer you who takes the photograph, but receives the way to do it quite naturally and fully.”
“For me, art is such a wide concept - anything can be art.”

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