Tags archives: The Salt of the Earth

  • For 40 years, the Brazilian-born photographer Sebastião Salgado has been documenting people and events around the world, driven by curiosity, adventure, and deep empathy for the human condition. Trained as an economist, he left the security of that profession to travel to such farflung places as the Arctic Circle, remote Andes villages, Kuwait, and several African nations, where he lived among locals and immersed himself in the culture. The resulting collections of stunning black and white images include his books Other Americas, Workers, Terra, Exodus and Africa. At one point, soul-sick from the tragedy he had witnessed in Rwanda, Salgado lost his desire to work, but regained it when he and his wife/work partner Lélia decided to replant the forest around the family ranch. That project ultimately became Instituto Terra, a thriving ecological reserve. Salgado’s current work involves the discovery and documentation of untouched landscapes, a tribute to the beauty of the planet. When Sebastião’s son Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, a documentary filmmaker, decided to make a movie about his father, he enlisted the help of renowned German auteur Wim Wenders, a friend and admirer. The result of their collaboration, The Salt of the Earth, is a beautiful, profound work about a remarkable artist, his family, and the bonds he forges with his subjects. Following are excerpts from a recent roundtable discussion with Wenders and Juliano Salgado: Did you think about the differences be[...]