Some minutes into the UK premiere of Wim Wenders and Juliano Riberdo Salgado's The Salt of the Earth at the benefit opening of the 2015 Human Rights Watch Film Festival in London, someone whispers in my ear: “So what does this have to do with human rights?”
The film offers no simple answer in its trace of the artistic process of Sebastião Salgado (Juliano's father) as he travels through a forest with his camera, across the Arctic waiting for a polar bear to tell its story, or sitting alone, facing a vista of fields, vast mountains and sky, and telling us that this was where he learned how to see. Yet its depiction of the life and art of one of 20th century's most interesting photographers invites us to think more deeply about the relationship between visual immediacy, our unease with formal beauty as so often expressed in critiques of social photography, and moral clarity.
The Salt of the Earth captures a deep tension between the immediacy of Salgado's images and the breadth of time and worlds he traverses to reach these moments so that whole lifetimes and histories can be captured within a flash second. Even though framing and composition are of paramount narrative significance for Salgado, so that a story cannot be properly told in its full dramatic intensity without the correct relationship between earth and sky and between light and creatures, he does not impose the demands of his own sense of time upon others. He waits, follows, runs, climbs, or jumps behind and alongside his subjects as they are or have to be. He invites them to test him and to share what they will. The images of lives and circumstances that emerge are the culmination of mutual trust, friendship and symbiosis developed between the photographer and his subjects over weeks, months, even years.
