The Salt of the Earth

Wim Wenders' directorial collaboration "The Salt of the Earth" with Juliano Ribeiro Salgado is a tribute to his father, Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado. The two directors accompany photographer Salgado as he works on his last major photographic project, "Genesis," which was a counterpoint to decades of documenting extreme suffering. For example, Sebastião Salgado had documented the genocide in Rwanda starting in 1994, and had also captured poverty, war, and atrocities in pictures for decades before that. Human and man-made misery, which is also the subject of the film. A contemporary witnessing that sickened the photographer and led him to turn to the beauty of the earth with "Genesis". Born in 1944 as the son of a Brazilian cattle farmer, Sebastião Salgado, who studied economics, began working as an independent photographer in 1973. The base station for his work is Paris; his photographic travels took him mainly to Africa, Latin America and Europe. In the 1970s, Salgado, who fled to Europe with his wife in 1969 to escape the Brazilian dictatorship, documented, among other things, the Carnation Revolution in Portugal and the subsequent upheavals in Portugal's former colonies of Angola and Mozambique. From then on, both African countries were marked by protracted civil wars and East-West proxy conflicts. Wars and their consequences, famine and displacement thus became an important part of Salgado's work almost from the beginning. Over the years, he focused his work on long-term observations. His first book of photographs, Other Americas (1986), depicts the daily lives of Latin American peasants. Sebastião Salgado was honored with the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 2019. He is only the second visual artist to receive this prestigious award.