Quotes from Sebastiao Salgado

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

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.

Photography has become a small world with so many jealous people. You do a story and then a lot of people try to do the same thing.

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.

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

! 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.

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

It's more important for a photographer to have very good shoes, than to have a very good camera

I'm not an artist. An artist makes an object. Me, it's not an object, I work in history, I'm a storyteller.

It is important what you eat now, what you do now. If we were interested in a sustainable planet where other generations have a right to a decent future, we would not live like this.

I'm not a religious person. The language of photography is symbolic.

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.

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

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.

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.

My way of photographing is my way of life. I photograph from my experience, my way of seeing things.

For me, art is such a wide concept - anything can be art.

The most important thing for me is to have my cereal. I have milk and granola and cheese. And that's it. I have a lot of cereals that I eat all day long, and I have a big appetite. All over the planet I carry my cereals!

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.

Of course, I won't be abandoning photography, because it is my life.

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.

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.

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.

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