Wim Wenders, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado
Il Sale della Terra

This film rediscovers the simple, beautiful, and now forgotten “turtle theorem.” You cannot pose it. You must adapt to its slowness, to its turns. Which in their circle describe a destiny. "It took me a whole day to approach the turtle. A whole day to make it understand that I respected its territory," said Sebastiao Salgado, describing his attempt to photograph a Galapagos turtle for his major reportage titled Genesis.

Salgado's black and white photos, so real and yet so partial (only in color photography is everything visible), help to partially reconstruct that reality, to fill the void of reality within us, patiently using memory and imagination. You move among landscapes that are humanly immense, boundless. Try to do so with caution, enthusiasm, and love, as they seem to say, because "the planet is alive, connected in all its elements, living at all levels." Try to close your circle. It is already so much, a small miracle unfolding.

Faithful to the theorem, Salgado approaches photography no longer in his youth. Born in 1944, he tries to become a lawyer and leaves his studies, then enrolls in Economy and Statistics. He wants to abandon everything again to become a mechanical engineer, when, on a trip to Africa commissioned by the investment bank he works for, he decides to become a photographer. It's 1973. For the first time, he sees "what we were before we launched into the city’s violence, where our right to space, air, sky, and nature got lost among the walls of houses." He documents the Portuguese revolution of '74, the conditions of immigrant workers in Europe, the colonial wars in Angola and Mozambique, the life of indigenous farmers in Latin America, the famine in Africa in the 1980s, the end of industrial labor. “Workers” and “Migrations” are projects composed of hundreds of images taken worldwide.

During a reportage on the Rwandan genocide in 1994, he falls ill with deep depression that makes him lose all trust in the human race, contemplating abandoning photography forever. "In Rwanda, I saw total brutality. I saw thousands of people dying every day, and I lost trust in our species. I didn’t believe it was possible for us to live anymore. That was when I got sick," he said.

After the long crisis, Salgado resumed photographing, focusing his research on the moving beauty of our planet. Over ten years (2003-2013), he produced “Genesis,” a tribute to Earth and its creatures, and also a way to exorcise horrors and violence, realizing that “we have become very complicated animals, alien to the planet and to ourselves.” For this work, Salgado traveled to discover areas and landscapes of extreme beauty, still untouched—Amazon, Congo, Antarctica, New Guinea—in an attempt to show that “about half of the planet is just as it was on the day of Genesis,” having reached the origins of the world, safeguarding its future, and participating in a new harmony.

Innocence and sweetness are backlit, placed within the eternal contrast between life and death, light and shadow, destruction and hope, which is the basis of Sebastiao Salgado’s entire work and effectively conveyed by Wim Wenders and Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, Sebastiao's son, in “The Salt of the Earth” (2014). The viewer is encouraged to take time to observe wonderful images that impress and move. A young mother, in an almost post-apocalyptic refugee camp, holding and nearly enveloping her small, vital, and smiling child, while the war's smoke rises in the background. What remains of a school after a mass killing in Rwanda. A child dressed in nothing facing the drought with pride and dignity along with his dog, looking at the horizon. Supported by a force similar to that evoked by Fred Sparks, the war veteran, speaking with the protagonist of the film “Lucky” by John Carroll Lynch, an ironic and now very old Dean Stenton, about an attack on the enemy, and a little girl dressed in rags: "It came from inside, from the center of her being. In that God-forsaken place, something like that shone. It left us in awe. We were there, all covered in shit, pieces of people everywhere, not even a tree left. And she was smiling from ear to ear. When I think of that child’s gorgeous face and that smile, in the midst of all that horror, of how she was celebrating joy… There are no medals for that kind of courage."

But we also see Salgado’s circle close slowly, with naturalness and sweetness, around him, his wife Lélia Wanick, a life companion, their children, his land, and his home, after traveling the world in small planes, boats, canoes, and a hot-air balloon. We observe his arc traveling outside the walls and courtyards of houses, through time and space. Describing a destiny as vast as the world he inhabited, and small as the child who first dreamed it.

He seems increasingly concerned with the fate of the land where he was born, Brazil, of the forests—together with Lélia, he has replanted two million trees, of hundreds of different species, in an area in Southeast Brazil to "breathe better and nurture hopes for the future"—the water, and the approximately one hundred human groups living in complete isolation. "I have been photographing among them for four years, I will continue for two more. This work will be released in 2021 and I believe it will simply be called Amazonia," he recently said while visiting Italy.

Perhaps it is all here, all this, the "true harvest of everyday life" that Thoreau speaks of in “Walden,” "as indescribable as the colors of morning and evening." A handful of stardust, a segment of the rainbow that we try to hold tightly in our hands.