The Salt of the Earth

Last night I saw the heart-wrenching movie “The Salt of the Earth,” directed by Wim Wenders and Juliano Salgado that explores the work of Brazilian economist and photojournalist Sebastiao Salgado, Juliano’s father, and the support, which his mother Leila gave to him in order for him to complete this amazing life journey. I was also lucky enough to see the live exhibit of his work entitled “Genesis” in Seville, when I was there in June http://www.icp.org/exhibitions/sebastião-salgado-genesis.

“Nowadays, although ‘my vision of the human being has not changed, I no longer think just of my own species,’ Mr. Salgado said, speaking in Portuguese, in a telephone interview from his studio in Paris with the NY Times last month, adding “That’s not my only preoccupation. Today I think of the other species too, of the ants, the termites, the whales, they are as important as my own. The behavior of our species, what we do to nature, to other species, to each other, is awful, so I have the same skepticism about us that I always had.’”

I also happened recently to read the book “K” by the Brazilian writer Bernado Kucinski, which immersed me in the “faceless, impassive, impervious, perverse, cruel and unapproachable” regime that the main character K, referred to as “the Brazilian State.”

This is in fact the regime, which caused Sebastiao Salgado to flee Brazil for Paris with his wife Leila in 1969 as political refugees.

Since then, Salgado has travelled to over 100 countries in his epic journey, which is beautifully documented in this amazing movie. Images from these journeys can also be seen in his books Other Americas (1986), Sahel: l’homme en détresse (1986), Sahel: el fin del camino (1988), Workers (1993), Terra (1997), Migrations and Portraits (2000), and Africa (2007).

I cannot encourage my readers strongly enough to see this extraordinary movie and exhibit, it raises profound and disturbing moral and ethical questions about us “the human species,” which we have yet to answer. Ones that we must consider everyday as we watch the flood of Syrian refugees, and contemplate the pictures that stream into our living rooms of dead and injured children.