You photograph with all your ideology.
Interpretation
Photography is influenced by one's beliefs and perspectives.
Sebastiao Salgado's quote highlights that photography is not merely a technical skill, but an art form deeply intertwined with the photographer's worldview and ideology. It suggests that how one captures images is reflective of their values, beliefs, and emotional responses to the world around them, emphasizing the subjective nature of art and representation.
In practice
This quote can be shared in a photography workshop to emphasize creative expression.
I have a way to photograph. You work with space, you have a camera, you have a frame, and then a fraction of a second. It's very instinctive. What you do is a fraction of a second, it's there and it's not there. But in this fraction of a second comes your past, comes your future, comes your relation with people, comes your ideology, comes your hate, comes your love - all together in this fraction of a second, it materializes there.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My way of photographing is my way of life. I photograph from my experience, my way of seeing things.
I nearly always write β just as I nearly always breathe.
Novel-writing can be a cold-blooded business. One uses whatever happens to be lying around in memory and employs it to suit oneβs endβ¦.Then, again, during the months whilst one is writing about the past, a story is colored by what presently is happening to its writer. So, imperceptibly, the tone of voice changes, original intentions slip away. And I found myself looking through another window at a darker landscape inhabited by neither the present nor the past.
The attitude that nature is chaotic and that the artist puts order into it is a very absurd point of view, I think. All that we can hope for is to put some order into ourselves.
Digital photography is, by definition, unfinished. You don't feel that after every 24 or 36 shots you have to change your film - you know you can go on for ever if you want. You can see the result immediately, and find out if your original idea is worth going on with or not, whether it can be corrected, whether it can be improved.
The mission of photography is to explain man to man and each to himself. And that is the most complicated thing on earth.
There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.
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