© Sebastião SALGADO / Amazonas images
4/4 Stars
Rated PG-13
Directed by Wim Wenders and Juliano Ribeiro Salgado
As Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado reminds us at the start of Salt of the Earth, photography comes from the Greek for “writing with light.” And that is precisely what he has done in a striking and vast body of work assembled over the decades. He isn’t simply pointing a camera and hoping for the best, but composing documentary images in light and shadow.
Working with the photographer’s son, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, director Wim Wenders documents the documentarian. For many scenes in Salt of the Earth, Wenders mirrors Salgado’s style in richly textured shades of gray. In others, Salgado or Wenders’ voice-overs accompany a sequence of still photos, chronicling a visual vocation that began in the 1970s when Salgado’s wife Lelia purchased a camera.
Salgado describes the photos he took of a Brazilian gold mine as reminiscent of the building of the pyramids or the Tower of Babel. Up and down the enormous pit, a scar on the cheek of the Earth, clamber hordes of workers shouldering bags of soil from the bottom of the shaft. They came from all walks of life, willing to risk everything for a share of the gold.
Likewise, some of Salgado’s photos from famine or war zones suggest the work of engraver Albrecht Durer in scenes of almost medieval catastrophe where the angel of death vies with the survival of the human spirit. Educated as an economist, Salgado renounced a career with the World Bank for a mission to record the suffering caused by the world’s economic and political systems. He put himself at risk. In early-’80s Ethiopia, he ducked bullets from the Communist regime’s helicopters as he recorded the grave faces of refugees fleeing a government determined to starve its people. In 1991, explosions in the burning oil fields of Kuwait left him hard of hearing. The images from Kuwait, with their plumes of smoke and fire, are a vision of hell erupting on Earth.
Years of covering human tragedy and the contagion of hatred left Salgado deeply pessimistic as well as exhausted. But Salt of the Earth has a happy ending. Returning home to care for his aged father, he discovered that the family’s farmland had degraded into a wasteland. He replanted the rainforest, watched the brown hills return to green and set forth on a new vocation of documenting the survival of nature.
Opens Friday, April 17, Downer Theatre.
