Genius at work: Documentary about our greatest living photographer (Salgado)

If I were to watch it again, which I might, I would watch the Wenders-Salgado documentary, The Salt of the Earth, on mute, as the movie is essentially an opportunity to see Sabastiao Salgado's amazing (mostly b/w) photography - grouped, in this film (and I think in his published books) into a few sections: Other Americans (early visit to Latin America), war photos, work, the Sahara (famine in Africa), displaced people (African wars), and finally nature (and anthropology, undisturbed tribes in the Amazon - near Salgado's home town). Virtually every image of Salgado's work is astonishing - the composition, the clarity, the capturing of emotion, the sympathy for the dispossessed and the grand sense of the forces of economics crushing individuals - particularly notable in his work on the gold mines of Brazil, which open the film. Wenders - himself an amazing cinematographer who, like Salgado, has brought us to many odd places - Siberia, Alaska (Grizzly Man), the cave paintings of Southern France, the Amazon (in his feature films) [[Note in 2020: Obviously I made a mistake here; Grizzly Man and Cave of Forgotten Dreams are films by Werner Herzog, not Wenders]] - gives us I think just enough info about Salgado and his working methods so as to inform but not obstruct Salgado's work and imagery. It was interesting to learn that he began his career as an economist, working mostly in 3rd World settings, which explains the ideas behind his many great projects. Also very important and eye-opening to see him at work: as we see the published photographs, so meticulous and precise, we never think about the incredible danger Salgado himself faced to get these images - the film lets us see that - or about the difficulty of capturing moving and evolving events of work and war into single, deeply expressive stills. There are a couple of sequences in which Wenders and Salgado's son (the co-director) film S. at work - although it's clear that in his later years he's not taking on the monumentally ambitious (and dangerous) projects of his youth - but how often to we get to see live footage of a genius at work? The film breaks no ground per se as a documentary or work of art in its own right, but it's a valuable and perhaps definitive account of the work of probably the greatest living photographer.