Sebastiao Salgado Quotes

The art of photography is all about directing the attention of the viewer.

It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument.

By making pictures, you learn the many different properties of photography. I use those properties differently than, say, an advertising agency would, but we're both operating in the same reality. A face painted by Picasso occupies the same reality as a portrait by Stieglitz.

Look at lots of exhibitions and books, and don't get hung up on cameras and technical things. Photography is about images.

A photographer must choose a palette as painters choose theirs.

A photo is a creation.

A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.

One of the difficulties of photography is that it is much better at being explicit than at being reticent.

In everything I do, the aesthetics are driven by the emotion. However I can do that with a camera, whether it's a long lens or a wide lens, I'll do.

A photograph can look anyway. It just depends basically on what you photograph.

Photography is a medium of formidable contradictions. It is both ridiculously easy and almost impossibly difficult. It is easy because its technical rudiments can readily be mastered by anyonwith a few simple instructions. It is difficult because, while while the artist working in any other medium begins with a blank surface and gradually brings his conception into being, the photographer is the only imagemaker who begins with the picture completed. His emotions, his knowledge, and his native talent are brought into focus and fixed beyond recall the moment the shutter of his camera has closed.

If you are truly successful in capturing the pulse of life, then you can speak of a good photograph.

It's just about going out and getting the shot, so I have a great understanding of how to execute it, so that really helps me, and also having a good understanding of all the action that I'm shooting, it helps me in determining how I'm going to capture it.

There are a thousand ways to point a camera, but really only one.

You want to make the photograph work in every way possible. Doesn't matter where it is in the world.

An illustration is a visual editorial - it's just as nuanced. Everything that goes into it is a call you make: every color, every line weight, every angle.

Photography can be a volatile situation. It can be very potent.

A camera is a tool for learning how to see without a camera.

I'm not an artist. I set the camera up and tell my story.

So much of it is the design of the shot or the motion of the character; it's the work you do so that it has the same things that are in the movie. In just a few frames it's got to communicate something clearly and dramatically.

So I like to try to go back and develop pure visual storytelling. Because to me, it's one of the most exciting aspects of making movies and almost a lost art at this point.

The style depends on the subject.

I was always interested in photography and other forms of art.

For example, in painting the form arises from abstract elements of line and color, while in cinema the material concreteness of the image within the frame presents - as an element - the greatest difficulty in manipulation.

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.