For anyone that has ever dreamed of travelling the world as a photographer, The Salt of the Earth is the pinnacle exhibition of that sentiment. Übermensch Wim Wenders directs and narrates an exposé of Sebastião Salgado's 40-year career as photojournalist, artist and ethnographer. Salgado's black and white photographs, taken in South America, Africa and Central Europe provide us an opportunity to accompany him on a journey, as he describes it, "to witness the human condition." The photographs are a beautiful, stark reminder of man as a beastly animal, cruel in his tyranny over the land and others. The photos from the Serra Palada gold mine in Brazil, my personal favourites, are astonishing in their magnitude, exposing man as both ant and God. Wenders' film is a stunning revelation of Salgado's works and requires your full intellectual and emotional intelligence to appreciate what you can.

The sound of 50,000 people in a gold mine in Brazil takes one back to the time the pyramids were built. You may hear the gold whispering. Here there are slaves to the idea of getting rich. Among the Tarahumera of Mexico no one walks so much as flies. Witness in the Balkans, Iraq, Rwanda and elsewhere how contagious hatred can be. The beautiful and terrible images of photographer Sebastião Salgado are seared in my consciousness like a profound dream. This is thanks to the masterful storytelling by the documentary filmmakers. They take viewers around the world and on waves of emotion, to understand photographer Sebastião Salgado's life and unique way of seeing things.The portrait is extremely powerful. Sebastião's adventures brought him in contact with diverse peoples with very different senses of time, rhythms and ways of thinking. Behind every mountain, in each person's eyes, there is a compelling story. The film went in surprising directions and is unpredictable. This may be different if you are familiar with Sebastião and his work, which I was not. The real life, words, images and stories in this film are enthralling. It is fascinating to understand what healed Sebastião's despair, but to reveal this would mar the ending, which I will not do. You should see for yourself! Available on Netflix.

I went to see this critically acclaimed film with my friend photographer who had studied and emulated Sebastião Salgado well received and revered black and white work.I had seen a suggestive and interesting movie trailer and was later pleased, doing my research, to see Wim Wenders involved. He had done the daring, decisive, eclectic, artistic tribute to Pina (2011) which I loved and to a lesser extent was able to catch some of the essence of Cuba and its music in Buena Vista Social Club (1999). Wenders is remarkable here and sets the tone. Now the other revelation as the co-writer/director as well as co-cinematographer is Sebastião Salgado's son: Juliano Ribeiro Salgado.Juliano documents his father (and parts of his own) life and journey and makes the piece even more personal. This reminded me of the moving tribute of Nathaniel Kahn to his dad Louis Kahn in My Architect (2003) with a huge difference being that Sebastião Salgado (and even the grandfather Sebastião Salgado senior) were still alive to film together as opposed to a posthumous search for the trace of one's father through his work and people's anecdotes in the case of Khan.As for the movie itself it is a treat to the eyes, heart, head and soul. It combines beautiful and often haunting photographs with story, narration, interview and introspection. It tell the tales in three prominent continents of the continuous search for understanding of humanity's worse and best achievements and attitudes. It conveys, loss, fear, hopelessness, innocence, injustice and intolerance. It talks about war, politics, environment, economics, etc. Salgado was surprisingly an economist before leaving his steady job with a dream and his wife's camera to wander in Africa in search of human truth.He found that and more. A talent and an eye for camera, for capturing the man and the moment. The past, the future, the present and the context. The composition and the subtext... the sublime!Will everyone appreciate this film? Probably not. Yet for those who have the interest, the patience and the chance to see this documentary and delve into the decades of work, thoughts, themes and realizations of one man (and his loving, equally brave and brilliant, supportive family) will be greatly enriched and inspired by it. This film is like talking to a father wise beyond his years. A wisdom shared and mutually understood if not lived. Lived through his words and pictures. Because beyond all the darkness and difficulties, there is a light.Photography come from phōs meaning lightAnother documentary for the ages.

THE SALT OF THE EARTHA documentary on the photographer, Sebastiao Salgado's passion for exposing worlds that are hidden from our view as well as the undercurrents of man's greed, violence and inhumanity - all through what co-director Wim Wenders explains is the process of " drawing with light." The other director is Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, the photographer's son. For many years, I have been beguiled by Salgado's black and white imagery, particularly as source material and inspiration for many of my own late 1980s pastels. His representations are stark and at the same time filled with an expanse of tones - from the deep darkness of coal to the blinding whites which shine with the force of incorporeality; a range of imperceptibly varied grays sandwiched in-between - all breathtakingly beautiful and often reduced to abstract patternings which are in danger of overtaking his subjects, but Salgado is a master at balancing form and content.I was particularly moved by his photographs of the fierce deprivation that droughts and famine had wreaked on Sub- Saharan Africa - particularly Ethiopia. Because Salgado exposed situations that many people were not aware of, his photos drilled a space for perception into our consciousness. Salgado has traveled to over 100 countries - projects often lasted years and the resulting books include OTHER AMERICAS, WORKERS, SAHEL - THE END OF THE ROAD, MIGRATIONS, Africa, and most recently GENESIS - the book that became his respite after years away from his native environs, witnessing the globe's devastation, including chronicling the genocide in Rawanda and the Congo. By the late 1990's he was heartbroken: "We humans are a terrible animal; we are extremely violent…Our history is a history of war; it's an endless story…My soul was sick…I no longer believed in anything, in any salvation for the human species." (Quotes from Kenneth Turan's review in LA Times.) THE SALT OF THE EARTH invites us to enter Salgado's personal sphere; we meet his beloved wife Leila, the enduring relationship of his life, the editor of his photographs; the mother of Juliano and Rodrigo - the youngest born with Down syndrome; the compassion and love that unites the entire family in their own personal struggles with domesticity, and the enormous achievement of reclaiming the cattle ranch that was once Salgado's home near the town of Aimores in Brazil's state of Minas Gerais. Memories of the fecund greenery and waterfalls were incised into Sebastiao's childhood recollections and when he returned in the 1990's his homeland was an environmental disaster - dry and parched. Salgado, his spirit quenched by regarding the pillage, and spoliation around the universe was re-invigorated by Leila's dream of planting a forest in Brazil starting with a few trees and "returning the property to its natural state of subtropical rainforest…and in April 1998 they founded the Instituto Terra, an environmental organization…which has now been declared a Private Natural Heritage Reserve, some 17,000 acres of deforested and badly eroded land… have undergone a remarkable metamorphosis…More than four million seedlings native to Brazil's Atlantic Forest have been raised in the institute's own nursery…" * This resuscitation propelled Salgado to travel again focusing on the beauties of the planet, resulting in his latest book GENESIS. ( *About us -The Instituto Terra.) http://bit.ly/1JQQzvd The documentary uses Salgado's majestic photographs interspersing them with site visits to previously unrecorded locations, including old color footage; using his voice and conversations to great effect. We get a sense of the quiet strength of this man, his commitment to justice and the deep suffering that his vision extracts with the lens of a camera. The plethora of interchangeable living beings moving about silhouetted against the background of clouds billowing in the infinite skies, underscore the brevity of time and existence. We are only here for a short interval and Salgado's output is a plea for respect, justice and accommodation among the men/women/animals and the frangible cosmos we all inhabit.