Sebastiao Salgado Quotes

Nothing happens when you sit at home. I always make it a point to carry a camera with me at all times...I just shoot at what interests me at that moment.

I told myself, 'When I grow up, I want to make pictures that can inspire and nourish people.' Immediately, when I was 10, I started photographing nature. I built a darkroom. My first really good darkroom, not just down in the cellar, was when I was 14.

I am following Nature without being able to grasp her, I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.

Look at the things around you, the immediate world around you. If you are alive, it will mean something to you, and if you care enough about photography, and if you know how to use it, you will want to photograph that meaningness. If you let other people's vision get between the world and your own, you will achieve that extremely common and worthless thing, a pictorial photograph.

The camera gave me an incredible freedom. It gave me the ability to parade through the world and look at people and things very, very closely.

A camera gives you a purpose.

With a camera, one has to love individual cases.

This thing called the camera, that takes everything in equally, taught me a lot about how to see.

I really like doing portraits, but I like taking pictures of things that are natural, like scenery, too.

What is art? Nature concentrated.

Art is the child of Nature; yes, her darling child, in whom we trace the features of the mother's face, her aspect and her attitude.

I'm not a politician or a scholar or political historian. I'm just a photographer who's trying to capture a spirit. It's not an intellectual process; it's an intuitive process.

Photography helps people to see.

I just love photographing. I don't do it for anyone else.

There's a lot of different things that make me want to take photos. A lot of it is, for a long time I've been obsessed with the thought of time travel with my camera.

I kind of grew up with a camera in my hand.

I enjoy photography. It's a lot of fun. It keeps me on my P's and Q's and, when you think about it, most people think photography is just going to a game. But you start to think, dang, that would be a good picture. Or you're driving along and see something and think, 'that would be nice.'

You put your camera around your neck along with putting on your shoes, and there it is, an appendage of the body that shares your life with you. The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.

Art is embedded in nature and they who can extract it, have it.

You see what you think, you see what you feel, you are what you see If with the camera you can make others see it - that is photography.

I’m trying to please myself; certainly that’s a big criterion... though in a sense, I don’t take images just for myself. I take images that I think other people will want to see. I don’t take pictures to put in a box and hide them. I want as many people to see them as possible.

I found that the camera was a comforting companion. It opened up new worlds, and gave me access to people's most intimate moments. I discovered the privilege of seeing life in all its complexity, the thrill of learning something new every day. When I was behind a camera, it was the only place in the world I wanted to be.

None. They should just go out and photograph and stop talking about it. That's the only way they are going to find themselves. They can't do it in their heads - they have to go out and do it in the camera and get it on film.

Photography is only a new road from a different direction, but moving toward the common goal, which is life.

The camera can be a machine gun, a warm kiss, a sketchbook. Shooting a camera is like saying, Yes, yes, yes. There is no maybe. All the maybes should go in the trash.