If you can come away from a film with one image seared into your mind then the filmmaker has done a good job, but Wim Wenders, along with co-director Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, ensure you come away with several. That’s mainly thanks to the pictures taken by renowned Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Selgado, Juliano’s father, whose striking images take centre stage in this Oscar-nominated documentary.
The Salt of the Earth does more than just celebrate a work. It’s also a life story, documenting Selgado’s youth, his fleeing Brazil when the military seized power, his first forays into photography, becoming a father, and returning later to explore his country and rediscover his family. There’s also room to follow Selgado today, as he continues to shoot wildlife - the documentary crew rolling across the tundra so to keep low and not spook a polar bear is an odd sight - and spend time with a tribe in Papa New Guinea.
Wenders and Salgado open with a work that certainly gets one in the mood for what’s to come: Sebastiao Selgado’s images of a Brazilian gold mine have an Escher-like what-end-is-up eye-boggling style to them; the black and white images of half-naked bodies clambering up and down ladders look like medieval etchings of Dante’s inferno. Later pictures have the same distressing effect, like the baby laid to rest in her rented coffin, eyes open because she wasn’t baptised.
But it’s the images compiled in Sahel: The End of the Road that really resonate. Selgado’s forays into Ethopia and the Sudan during 1984 produced the photographer’s most famous work, and the moving pictures of starving and dying families burrow into the brain and refuse to leave. It’s slow, with the soothing tones of the Selgados trading narration to comment on either the work itself (Sebastiao) or stringing together the narrative (Juliano), but the unhurried pace allows the eye to fully take in the haunting images presented.
There have been a number of documentaries about photographers of late - Anton Corbijn: Inside Out, Finding Vivian Maier, Bill Cunningham New York, McCullin - but the unforgettable images in The Salt of the Earth shows there’s room for more.
