The Salt of the Earth

The Salt of the Earth is a film that portrays the works of Sebastião Salgado. In the film, Sebastião describes how his experiences changed him profoundly, and in many ways, the film did the same for me. It features his stunning photographs from Africa, South America, and central Europe. At the beginning, Sebastião explains that he chose to follow and photograph people because he cares about them and sees them as the salt of the earth.

Sebastião would leave his family and immerse himself for years at a time in the lives of different groups of people in order to better understand them and capture their stories. His black and white images of “humanity on the move” have the power to communicate their pain, despair, hunger, desperation, determination, love, and hope. It is impossible for me to comprehend what these people experienced and so many continue to experience every day. This film, however, gave me enough of a glimpse to know I want to do something, anything, to make even the smallest difference.

Sebastião said that what he learned about human nature and the world we live in made him deeply apprehensive about the future. The film shows that he was so much affected by what he had witnessed that he needed to put down his camera and take a break to allow his soul time to heal. Much of this healing was made possible for him through replanting his father's forest on the hills he grew up on in Brazil. Watching new life grow where there was nothing but death and dry wasteland provided him with some hope and joy again. The message to me was that hope is never lost completely and one person can make a significant difference to the world.

Deciding to become more aware of complex issues like these is not easy. It is more comfortable to just set something we hear aside on a shelf when we know it will affect us emotionally. When you become aware you start to care, caring means you feel the need to act in some way, and action takes effort. However, Sebastião shows that effort is absolutely necessary, and worth it.

I would highly recommend this film to anyone. It will change you. The trailer is bellow.  

Trailer link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OivMlWXtWpY

Introduction

Hello friends and family. We have all been hearing a lot recently about the “refugee crisis”. In 2015, more than a million migrants and refugees crossed the borders into Europe. The biggest driver of the migration is the conflict in Syria, but great numbers are also fleeing Afghanistan, Eritrea, and Kosovo.

Germany has received the highest number of people, with over 1 million by the end of 2015. I lived in Frankfurt Germany until I started college last Fall. I heard a lot about the refugees, but never felt a real need or desire to get personally involved somehow. When I was back in Frankfurt at Christmas time, however, I visited a refugee camp of 500, just 30 minutes from my house, and got to distribute gifts and food to many of the people. The crisis, literally at my doorstep, felt far more real to me after that point.

I will be learning more about the migrants and refugees all around us in the upcoming weeks, and will be recording my thoughts in this blog.

First, I want to introduce Sebastião Salgado. Sebastião is a Brazilian photographer who has dedicated the majority of his career to projects that focus on people and places of the world that many of us often overlook or misunderstand. For six years in forty countries, Sebastião worked with what he calls “humanity on the move”. This involved fugitives on the road, in refugee camps, or in slums. In a single black and white image, a snapshot of a moment, he can capture someone’s story. It is difficult to view one of Sebastião’s photographs and not be affected by it in some way. I have been deeply moved by his work. I will be writing more about him and what we can learn from him in subsequent posts.

Sebastião Salgado