Learning From the Masters – Sebastiao Salgado

“Learning from the Masters” is a weekly series where share useful lessons we can learn from others, regardless of their medium. The important thing for me is how we can apply these lessons to photography, and to our lives as creative individuals.

Sebastiao Salgado is one of the greats – regardless of what type of photography you like. Known for embarking on long term self-assigned projects, his documentary and photojournalistic work about the working class is what has defined most of his career.

In his most recent project Genesis, he has turned his incredible eye towards nature, which was conceived as a potential path to humanity’s rediscovery of itself in nature. He spend 8 years working on it, including 2 years doing research. This recent presentation at TED captures much of what makes him a true master of photography and story telling. I love his passion and single minded dedication to his subject and his message.

“I did not make pictures just because I was an activist or because it was necessary to denounce something, I made pictures because it was my life, in the sense that it was how I expressed what was in my mind — my ideology, my ethics — through the language of photography. For me, it is much more than activism. It’s my way of life, photography.”

Watch the video