Sebastião Salgado: “I had travelled to the dawn of time.”
After reading Sebastiao Salgado's latest book "From my Land to the Planet", I guess i have to catch this one "The Salt of the Earth", directed by his son Juliano and the German director Wim Wenders. Sebastião Salgado has created some of the twentieth century’s most iconic photography. From war zones to famine, genocide to exodus, Salgado has documented many of the world’s major events of the last 40 years in crisp black-and-white pictures. He’s also won countless prizes, including being named last week as a Master of Photography at Photo London 2015. I will highly recommend to any photographers out there to read his book as u will find a lot of inspiration and comfort in one of the greatest social documentary photographer and photojournalist in our time.
Extract from the book (Looking death in the face):
“I have always tried to show people in all their dignity. In the majority of cases, they are the victims of cruelty, of events. They are photographed at a time in which they have lost their homes, seen their loved ones murdered, sometimes even their own children. For the most part, they are innocent people who do not deserve the misfortunes that have struck them. I took these photos because I thought that everyone needed to know. That is my opinion, but I don’t force anyone to look at them. I am not here to lecture or to set my conscience at rest by arousing feelings of compassion. I took these images because I had a moral, ethical obligation to do so. In such moments of suffering, you may ask, what are morals, what are ethics? It is when I am faced with someone who is dying and I have to decide whether or not to release the shutter of my camera.”