June 2013
“Salgado’s over the top depictions of the natural world are one thing, but what I find more troubling is the representation of the indigenous tribes in his photographs. On the most straightforwardly obvious level there seems to be an implicit equation between indigenous people and the animals in Genesis, a sense that these people are more closely related to a lemur or an iguana than they are to the visitors of the exhibition. The subtext throughout seems to be that these tribes, like the enviroments they inhabit, are impotent to protect themselves, that they need us.”
—Lewis Bush, Review: Sebastio Salgado at Natural History Museum
“I firmly believe that you tell the same story in different versions and different parameters, over and over again,” he said. “If you look at the pictures that were made when I was in my early 20s, they are essentially the same pictures that I’m making now. [It’s] sort of depressing. But I think we’re all confined to that: to spend a lifetime trying to continually re-invent yourself as a photographer. At the core, your pictures are different versions of the same story.”
—Gregory Crewdson
“It all comes down to that urge to fascism — maybe a big word to use for art, but I think the right word — it comes down to that urge to fascism to know what’s best for people, to know that some people are of the best and some people are of the worst; the urge to separate the good from the bad and to praise oneself; to decide what covers on what books people ought to read, what songs people ought to be moved by, what art they ought to make, an urge that makes art into a set of laws that take away your freedom rather than a kind of activity that creates freedom or reveals it. It all comes down to the notion that, in the end, there is a social explanation for art, which is to say an explanation of what kind of art you should be ashamed of and what kind of art you should be proud of. It’s the reduction of the mystery of art, where it comes from, where it goes…”
—Greil Marcus
“I think this is the most exciting time in the history of photography,” he said. “Technology is expanding what photographers can do, like the microscope and the telescope expanded what scientists could do.”
—Richard Misrach
