Salt of the Earth

seen 7 August 2015

This documentary by Wim Wenders examines the career of the Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado. Salgado himself speaks in the film, and Wenders also provides some of the commentary - including some wry observations on having a photographer as the subject of a cinematic essay. Salgado's son Juliano Rebeira Salgado co-directed the film and makes some remarks, though his relationship to his father is not the major focus of the film..

Salgado, who only took up photography after his wife had bought a camera (he had previously been working for the World Bank), committed himself to various projects which lasted several years each in far-flung areas of the earth. His homage to 'Other Americas' includes the amazing photographs of the open-cast Serra Pelada goldmine in Brazil with which the film begins. There are far more harrowing images from the Ethiopian famine of 1984 and the Rwanda genocide of 1994, experiences which lead to an increasing pessimism in Salgado's commentary. But to counter this, Juliano accompanies his father on an expedition to photograph walruses in arctic Siberia, and there are sequences dealing with Salgado's encounters with remote Papuan and Amazonian tribes. There is also an inspiring account of the family's decision to replant the rainforest on the dessicated hills of the family farm.

Salgado's own comments provide a fascinating insight into the work, which is given fine and sympathetic exposre in this film. Through all the barbarity of human strife and the awfulness of suffering through drought and famine, Salgado's unassuming presence and unerring capacity to find the appropriate image render even the most harrowing of events. The later 'Genesis' project showed that his skill was equally engaged when the subject was 'other animals' or the natural world at large.

'Salt of the Earth' is a fine tribute to this master photographer and wise human being.