Sebastiao Salgado Quotes

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.

The problem is, we live in a society where all that interests us is power and money. So we don't have any interest in our children, and what we leave for our children is not important.

When you work fast, what you put in your pictures is what your brought with yoiu - your own ideas and concepts. When you spend more time on a project, you learn to understand your subjects. There comes a time when it is not you who is taking the pictures. Something special happens between the photographer and the people he is photographing. He realizes that they are giving the pictures to him.

If you take a picture of a human that does not make him noble, there is no reason to take this picture ...
If you take a picture of a human that does not make him noble, there is no reason to take this picture. That is my way of seeing things.

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.

We are living in a moment where we have broken the equilibrium of the planet. We are not paying attention to our intuitive side. We only pay attention to our reason. We have become an urban animal

I'm not a religious person. The language of photography is symbolic.

I try with my pictures to raise a question, to provoke a debate, so that we can discuss problems together and come up with solutions.

It's not the photographer who makes the picture, but the person being photographed.

It's more important for a photographer to have very good shoes, than to have a very good camera

The light in Alaska in particular is so beautiful. So beautiful! Such incredible light.

As in any person's life, there have been difficult moments: I have a son with Down's syndrome; through my photography, I have witnessed all manner of human degradation. But there have also been very happy moments.

In GENESIS, my camera allowed nature to speak to me. And it was my privilege to listen.

Of course I will continue photography. I love photography. But when you become old, it's too much.

There are moments that you suffer a lot, moments you won't photograph. There are some people you like better than others. But you give, you receive, you cherish, you are there. When you are really there, you know when you see the picture later what you are seeing.

I believe that the average person can help a lot, not by giving material goods but by participating, by being part of the discussion, by being truly concerned about what is going on in the world.

I work on stories rather than individual pictures.

I have tried to bring about better communication between people. I believe that humanitarian photography is like economics. Economy is a kind of sociology, as is documentary photography.

The language that photography has is a formal language. Any photographer is doing something formal. If it's formal, then it must be an aesthetic way to communicate.

In the end, the only heritage we have is our planet, and I have decided to go to the most pristine places on the planet and photograph them in the most honest way I know, with my point of view, and of course it is in black and white, because it is the only thing I know how to do.

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.

My way of photographing is my way of life. I photograph from my experience, my way of seeing things ...

What I want is the world to remember the problems and the people I photograph. What I want is to create a discussion about what is happening around the world and to provoke some debate with these pictures. Nothing more than this. I don't want people to look at them and appreciate the light and the palate of tones. I want them to look inside and see what the pictures represent, and the kind of people I photograph.

! discovered photography completely by chance. My wife is an architect; when we were young and living in Paris, she bought a camera to take pictures of buildings. For the first time, I looked through a lens - and photography immediately started to invade my life.

It is important what you eat now, what you do now. If we were interested in a sustainable planet where other generations have a right to a decent future, we would not live like this.

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.

I looked through a lens and ended up abandoning everything else.

When I was starting out, when I put aside my career as an economist. I looked at every book, went to every show, did my first stories, developed my first films. A fabulous time.

I photographed with film for many years; now that I work in digital, the difference is enormous. The quality is unbelievable: I don't use flash, and with digital I can even work in very bad light. Also, it's a relief not to lose photographs to x-ray machines in airports.

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.

Photography is full of symbolism, it's a symbolic language. You have to be able to materialize all your thoughts in one single image.

More than ever, I feel that the human race is one. There are differences of colour, language, culture and opportunities, but people's feelings and reactions are alike. People flee wars to escape death, they migrate to improve their fortunes, they build new lives in foreign lands, they adapt to extreme hardship ... .

We live in a society where we never prepare people to be a community.

I am a former economist. I never went to photography school to learn photography.