There is a fantastic interview with Sebastiao Salgado in the Sunday Times today which is a must read for anyone who admires his work or is passionate about black & white photography.

He talks about why he chooses black & white photography over colour and his journey into photography including working with Henri Cartier-Bresson and Bill Brandt.

I love this description from the interview:

“But I tell you, for me, each photographer brings his own light from when he was a kid – in a fraction of a second when you freeze reality, you also freeze all this back ground. You materialise who you are.”

This is why if you give the same camera to two different people and ask them to shoot the same scene, something different will always emerge. Personality seeps into the mechanism. Magical thinking, but maybe true.

on Black & white photography:

“when I saw my colour picture, I was much more interested in the colour than in the personality or dignity of the person. How can I go to a person and make them my story, and I don’t feel the story in my photographs? Of course, black & white is an abstraction, but from the brightest white to the darkest black what you have is greys, and these greys are what I had in my mind when I took the pictures.”

It’s a wonderful interview by Bryan Appleyard and you can read the full interview in todays Sunday Times magazine

http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/Magazine/Features/article1221096.ece

His exhibition Genesis will premier at the natural History Museum in London on April 11th – September 8th 2013

http://www.nhm.ac.uk/visit-us/whats-on/temporary-exhibitions/salgado-genesis/index.html

Definitely one to see!

You may also be interested in his inspiring work for UNICEF ‘Changing the world with children’

http://www.unicef.org/salgado/