Top 35 Sebastiao Salgado Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Sebastiao Salgado

2. “Let’s build Paradise again.”

— Sebastiao Salgado

3. “It’s more important for a photographer to have very good shoes, than to have a very good camera.”

— Sebastiao Salgado

4. “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.”

— Sebastiao Salgado

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

— Sebastiao Salgado

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

— Sebastiao Salgado

7. “I’m not an artist. An artist makes an object. Me, it’s not an object, I work in history, I’m a storyteller.”

— Sebastiao Salgado

8. “It’s not the photographer who makes the picture, but the person being photographed.”

— Sebastiao Salgado

9. “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.”

— Sebastiao Salgado

10. “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.”

— Sebastiao Salgado

11. “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.”

— Sebastiao Salgado

12. “I’m not a religious person. The language of photography is symbolic.”

— Sebastiao Salgado

13. “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.”

— Sebastiao Salgado

14. “For me, art is such a wide concept – anything can be art.”

— Sebastiao Salgado

15. “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.”

— Sebastiao Salgado

16. “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.”

— Sebastiao Salgado

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

— Sebastiao Salgado

18. “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.”

— Sebastiao Salgado

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

— Sebastiao Salgado

20. “You photograph with all your ideology.”

— Sebastiao Salgado

21. “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.”

— Sebastiao Salgado

22. “I have two children. I have a Down syndrome child whom I love very much, and my wife that I love.”

— Sebastiao Salgado

23. “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.”

— Sebastiao Salgado

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

— Sebastiao Salgado

25. “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.”

— Sebastiao Salgado

26. “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.”

— Sebastiao Salgado

27. “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.”

— Sebastiao Salgado

28. “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.”

— Sebastiao Salgado

29. “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.”

— Sebastiao Salgado

30. “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.”

— Sebastiao Salgado

31. “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.”

— Sebastiao Salgado

32. “I 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.”

— Sebastiao Salgado

33. “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.”

— Sebastiao Salgado

34. “I work on stories rather than individual pictures.”

— Sebastiao Salgado

35. “Of course, I won’t be abandoning photography, because it is my life.”

— Sebastiao Salgado

36. “Of course I will continue photography. I love photography. But when you become old, it’s too much.”

— Sebastiao Salgado