THE SALT OF THE EARTH

The documentary portrait of photographer Sebastiao Salgado, whose body of work reflects an undiminished hope in human civilisation, is grounded in his longstanding career as a photojournalist. For the last forty years, the photographer Sebastiao Salgado has been travelling through the continents, in the footsteps of an ever-changing humanity. He has witnessed some of the major events of our recent history; international conflicts, starvation and exodus. Salgado's heart-wrenching photos of human tragedies have been featured globally, but Salgado has also been blamed for exploiting the victims for his own gains. Sebastiao Salgado's life and work are revealed to us by his son, Juliano, who accompanied him during his last travels, and by Wim Wenders, himself a photographer and great lover of black and white photography.

„When you photograph poverty and suffering, you have to give a certain dignity to your subject, and avoid slipping into voyeurism. It's not easy. It can only be achieved on condition that you develop a good rapport with the people in front of the lens, and you really get inside their lives and their situation. Very few photographers manage this. (...) I think that Sebastiao offered real dignity to all those people who found themselves in front of his lens. His photographs aren't about him, but about all those people!"
Wim Wenders