Conducting this psychoanalytic session in film form, in an act of cinematic courage that is as intellectual as it is emotional, are two converging perspectives: that of Wim Wenders, the analyst, the master of cinema who questions the moral validity of the image, and that of Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, the son, who questions the human weight of his father's absence. The film does not simply ask us “Who is Salgado?” It throws a much more dangerous question in our faces: “What does it cost to look? And what happens when the act of looking destroys you?” It is a film about the act of seeing taken to its breaking point, an investigation into a man's ability to absorb the horror of the world before the world devours him.

The structural genius of the film lies in its polyphony. On the one hand, we have Wenders' narration, his calm, almost academic tone, which seeks to frame the artist (just as Salgado frames his subjects). Wenders, the director who in The State of Things and Until the End of the World dissected the crisis of representation, finds his definitive subject here: an artist who has transformed representation into a form of biblical testimony. But Wenders is too intelligent to fall into the trap of the “making of.” He invents a meta-cinematic device of extraordinary power: the “camera obscura.” Salgado is not interviewed face to face. He sits in the dark, in front of a semi-transparent glass screen onto which his own photographs are projected. We, and Wenders, are on the other side of the glass. The result is that Salgado does not look at us: he looks through his works, reliving the genesis of each shot. His face, marked by time, overlaps with the faces he has immortalized. It is an interview, a confession, and an exorcism. It is the creator forced to confront the reflection of his soul, and we are witnesses to this act of self-analysis.

At the same time, Juliano Salgado's camera, often in color and shaky, provides us with a counterpoint. It is the intimate eye, the son following his father in Genesis, trying to understand the man behind the myth. If Wenders analyzes the Archive, Juliano seeks the Father. This dialectic between the intellectual gaze (Wenders) and the filial gaze (Juliano) prevents the film from becoming a monolith. It is the tension between the epic distance of Salgado's photography and the emotional closeness required by a cinematic portrait. The film is the perfect synthesis of these two needs, a bridge between Salgado's monumental black and white and the pulsating color of life that he himself, at a certain point, could no longer see.

And then there is the Work. The film forces us on a chronological journey through Salgado's major projects, and this journey is a catabasis, a Dantean descent. We begin with the epic landscapes of The End of the Road or The Other America. But it is with Workers that we enter the sublime. The sequence of the Serra Pelada gold mine is not photojournalism; it is Flemish painting, it is Dante's Inferno, it is Bosch. Salgado has the almost terrifying ability to find formal beauty, classical composition, in the midst of the most extreme suffering. His photographs are not Cartier-Bresson-style “snapshots”; they are tableaux vivants sculpted in chiaroscuro. His light does not illuminate, it engraves. And here the film, with honesty, touches on the criticism that has always been levelled at Salgado: is it moral to aestheticize suffering? Doesn't this almost unbearable beauty end up anesthetizing the horror, transforming miners into sculptures and refugees into icons?

The film does not answer directly, but shows us the price of that gaze. The descent continues with Migrations (Exodus). And this is where the artist breaks down. The film does not back down. It takes us with Salgado to Rwanda, Yugoslavia, and the Sahel. The photographer who had sought “the salt of the earth”—human dignity—finds himself facing the abyss. His words, spoken in that darkroom, are chilling. He says he has seen such darkness, such betrayal of the human species, that his very soul has become sick. He has stopped believing in anything. He has put down his camera because the act of photographing death has itself become a form of death. Salgado was no longer a witness; he had become an optical accomplice to the trauma. His body, poisoned by his own empathy, was giving way.

If the film ended here, it would be a nihilistic masterpiece, a Heart of Darkness of photography. But The Salt of the Earth has a third act, a redemption that is as powerful as it is unexpected. It is ecological redemption. The turning point comes not from art, but from action. It is Salgado's wife, Lélia Wanick Salgado (perhaps the true architect of his entire career, the curator of his gaze), who suggests the way out. Returning to the family farm in Brazil, once lush and now desertified by neglect, they decide to replant the forest. This act—the transition from witnessing death (photography) to creating life (reforestation)—is the true philosophical core of the film. It is Salgado's response to human darkness. If man is a virus capable of destruction (as in Rwanda), he is also a gardener capable of reconstruction. The Instituto Terra becomes his new project.

And only after this physical healing of the landscape can Salgado afford spiritual healing. Genesis is born. It is his escape from man. He turns his lens to what is uncontaminated: penguins, whales, walruses, Antarctic landscapes, isolated tribes. It is Salgado making peace with the planet. It is a return to Eden, but an Eden without Original Sin (industrialized humanity). Wenders films this rediscovered Salgado with infinite tenderness. The film closes on a perfect cycle: the man who looked hell in the eye, who was almost killed by what he saw, finds salvation not by forgetting, but by choosing to look elsewhere. It is not an escape, it is a rebirth. The Salt of the Earth is a testament, a film that still desperately believes that, despite everything, a photograph can save a soul. And a tree can save the world.