Salt of the Earth

Sebastião and Leila Salgado

Nevada Theatre in Nevada City hosts a film series and last night’s offering was The Salt of the Earth a Wim Wenders film about Brazilian photographer, Sebastião Salgado. I expected an evening of beautiful photos and an interesting story about the man behind the camera. The reality of the film included that expectation plus a shotgun blast to the heart and an adrenaline sip of hope.

The film opens on a huge open pit where there are thousands of grime covered men who look like ants climbing up huge ladders, each with black bags of dirt on their shoulders. The scene is out of a slavery horror film but these are not slaves; these workers are here because they want to be, and there is only one reason they want to be here … gold. Anytime a group discovers gold, they get to take a bag of dirt for themselves … sometimes they find gold in their bag, often they find nothing … but they are addicted to the search and willing to do the grueling work for the chance for riches.

Salgado is one of those rare combinations of talents. Schooled in economics, he uses his understanding of the underlying cause-and-effects of world systems to capture the essence of the madness and beauty of the world with his camera. The madness is soul crushing and almost unwatchable as endless minutes of murder, genocide, brutality and bodies piling up like unwanted timber remind us of the horrors of places like Rwanda and Bosnia and also remind us of our dark legacy that stretches far into the past through the Holocaust, Syria, the decimation of the American Indians, Armenia, Stalin’s Russia and on and on.

It is hard to think that, but for the luck of fate, this madness could have put any one of us on one side or the other of this violent legacy. The question becomes: what might possibly save us from the continuation of this blood soaked madness?

At some point Salgado could not continue to face the atrocities that he spent years chronicling, and decided to focus on the earth as it might have been in its beginning. This eight-year project, called an "homage to our planet in its natural state” resulted in the important and beautiful book GENESIS. Salgado and his wife and creative partner Leila also founded Instituto Terra, an ongoing project to restore a part of the Atlantic Forest in Brazil.