Sebastiao Salgado Quotes
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I'm not an artist. An artist makes an object. Me, it's not an object, I work in history, I'm a storyteller.
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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.
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Most of the information we now get is through television and is mutilated. Photography offers the opportunity to spend much more time on a topic. It's relatively cheaper medium, and can allow a photographer really to live in another place, show another reality, get closer to the truth.
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I looked through a lens and ended up abandoning everything else.
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So many times I've photographed stories that show the degradation of the planet. I had one idea to go and photograph the factories that were polluting, and to see all the deposits of garbage. But, in the end, I thought the only way to give us an incentive, to bring hope, is to show the pictures of the pristine planet - to see the innocence.
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I discovered that close to half the planet is 'pristine.' We live in towns such as London, Paris or Sao Paulo and have the impression that all the pristine areas are gone, but they are not.
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We live in a society where we never prepare people to be a community.
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It's not the photographer who makes the picture, but the person being photographed.
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Let's build Paradise again.
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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.
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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.
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I am a former economist. I never went to photography school to learn photography.
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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.
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Photography is full of symbolism, it's a symbolic language. You have to be able to materialize all your thoughts in one single image.
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In GENESIS, my camera allowed nature to speak to me. And it was my privilege to listen.
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It is a great honor for me to be compared to Henri Cartier-BressonBut I believe there is a very big difference in the way we put ourselves inside the stories we photograph. He always strove for the decisive moment as being the most important. I always work for a group of pictures, to tell a story. If you ask which picture in a story I like most, it is impossible for me to tell you this. I don't work for an individual picture. If I must select one individual picture for a client, it is very difficult for me.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The light in Alaska in particular is so beautiful. So beautiful! Such incredible light.
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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.
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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….
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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.
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I'm not a religious person. The language of photography is symbolic.