From the archive: "The Salt of the Earth"

For nigh-on forty years, the Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Salgado has been roaming the globe, travelling from the jungles of Papua New Guinea to the wilds of Siberia via the deserts of Africa in order to bring back images that might illustrate other cultures, other lives. Given the territory Salgado has so far covered, it’s scant surprise his trajectory should eventually have aligned with that of Teutonic culture vulture Wim Wenders, keen proponent of the restless life. In The Salt of the Earth, Wenders’ thoroughgoing profile of Salgado, these two fellow travellers finally train their cameras upon one another.

Wenders has found a grabby way into this oeuvre: Salgado’s reputation-making studies of latter-day Brazilian goldmines, so complex in their directionality, their apparently infinite flow of bodies, that they can’t fail to catch, hold and dazzle the casual observer’s eye. It’s a hell of a slideshow – some resembling Etcher etchings, the more infernal approaching Breughel’s canvasses – and remounting each photograph on the cinema screen, that ultimate lightbox, only points up dimensions that might have gone hidden or overlooked in a gallery context.

Time and again here, a notionally 2D image opens up to reveal a way of life, a philosophy, a vision. We’re offered a major insight into Salgado’s MO during an Arctic excursion (captured by his son Juliano, on what must have been a fairly extreme dads-and-lads outing), where the photographer repeatedly resists the temptation to snap a polar bear as “there’s nothing in the background, no action”. This eye, you sense, is searching for the ways in which its subjects interact with the landscape, or one another; the form of narrative photography this process yields proves ideal for sustained cinematic study.

A lesser documentarist might well have coasted on these endlessly striking, provocative images. Any lingering traces of compassion fatigue in the viewer will be scrubbed away by successive sets showing dead babies in 1970s Brazil (where infant mortality is through the roof), famine-stricken bodies in mid-80s Ethiopia (the crisis inherent in each image somehow going far beyond the usual Live Aid reportage), and the carnage in Rwanda as the civil war took hold in the 1990s; here, at least, Wenders knows he need do no more than show the pictures and allow the viewer to weigh their power for themselves.

In the linking segments, though, Wenders comes up with images all his own. Inscribing faces and forms in ravishing, high-definition, high-contrast black-and-white, he takes a particular care to situate Salgado within the landscape he’s most often found within, be that the darkroom or his self-created Instituto Terra, a complete ecosystem the photographer has cultivated back in his homeland as a site of renewal, and a counterbalance to all the destruction his lens has recorded over the decades.

In other words, Wenders frames Salgado as assuredly and as meticulously as Salgado has forever framed his own subjects: seeking out the drama and struggle in the photographer’s life and highlighting the humanity in the gaze – that element of conscience that insists everything within the frame, whether human, animal or mineral, merits preservation for posterity and closer study. The result isn’t just a valuable, gorgeously illustrated chronicle of an extraordinary career; it’s also a quest to find better, sharper, more perceptive ways of looking at the world – and, indeed, at one another.

(MovieMail, July 2015)

The Salt of the Earth is reissued to cinemas today as part of Curzon's Wim Wenders retrospective, and available to rent via Curzon Home Cinema, Prime Video, Google Play, YouTube and Apple TV+.