The Salt of the Earth

Two of last year's nominees for the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature were about photographers. One was about Vivian Maier, an amateur who was only discovered after she was dead. The Salt of the Earth, a film co-directed by Wim Wenders and Juliano Ribeiro Selgado, is about a photographer very much alive. Sebastiao Selgado is the subject, and he is an example of the photographer not merely as observer, but as empath.

Wenders, who narrates, bought one of Selgado's prints of gold miners in Brazil and sought to find out more about him. We learn that Selgado, who is Brazilian, grew up in an idyllic natural setting on his father's cattle farm, and then studied economics. He married, and tried out his wife's camera. There seems to have been no turning back.

Selgado's projects are massive. Each one takes years to complete. He started with "Other Americas," in which he criss-crossed South America and Mexico. He did a project on "Workers," which took him around the globe. He went to Africa to cover the drought and famine in Ethiopia. Most of us have seen pictures of the starving and the emaciated dead bodies, but Selgado's photos really got to me. My instinct was to turn the movie off, but I kept looking. Selgado, who participates fully, talked about how often he had to put the camera down and cry.

He also photographed the genocide in Rwanda and reached a breaking point, thinking that the human species was lost. To recover, he switched from a social photographer to a landscape and wildlife photographer for a project called "Genesis," in which he took photos of the land that hadn't been spoiled by humans, such as the Galapagos or above the Arctic Circle. He returned to his father's farm, which had been decimated into a wasteland, and with his wife started to replant trees to make it back into the rain forest it once had been. It is now a National Park.

The Salt of the Earth has a double pronged effect--the photographs are worthy of acclaim, and Selgado is an interesting and likable subject. By the end you might be ready to sign up with him on his next trip.