Sebastião Salgado
[Photographer, b. 1944, Aimores, Minas Gerias, Brazil, lives in Paris and Brazil.]
You photograph with all your ideology.
I’m not an artist. An artist makes an object. Me, it’s not an object, I work in history, I’m a storyteller.
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.
When you work fast, what you put in your pictures is what your brought with you—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.
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.
Photography is full of symbolism, it’s a symbolic language. You have to be able to materialize all your thoughts in one single image.
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.
You photograph here, you photograph there, you speak with people, you understand people, people understand you. Then, probably, you arrive at the same point as Cartier-Bresson, but from the inside of the parabola. And that is for me the integration of the photographer with the subject of his photograph... An image is your integration with the person that you photographed at the moment that you work so incredibly together, that your picture is not more than the relation you have with your subject.
