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.
Interpretation
The quality of a photograph is deeply influenced by the photographer's emotional connection with their subjects.
Sebastiao Salgado's quote highlights that the essence of a photograph is not solely determined by technical skills but rather by the emotional bonds and relationships the photographer shares with their subjects. This connection can greatly enhance the depth and resonance of the captured image, demonstrating that photography is as much about human connection as it is about the visual medium itself.
In practice
In a photography workshop, this quote can be used to emphasize the importance of building rapport with your models.
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.
The whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology.
If you're going to play human beings, and you're going to play them three-dimensionally, you have to show every side of them.
Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.
Art is purposiveness without purpose.
And I want to rise up, throw my arms open for a vast embrace, address an ample, luminous discourse to the invisible crowds. I would start like this: "O rainbow-colored gods. . .
The second, and I think this is the much more overt and I think it is the main cause, I have been increasingly demonstrating or trying to demonstrate that every possible stance a critic, a scholar, a teacher can take towards a poem is itself inevitably and necessarily poetic.
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