Feeling the Salt of the Earth

Irma 2022-04-20 09:02:17

From the perspective of photography, there must be a story behind a good piece of work. In the polar bear part, in order to capture the most wonderful moment of the polar bear, he was willing to wait, roll with the polar bear, and then use his sharp sense to capture that moment. It is the story of the photographer and the story of the person in the painting. The photo at the beginning of the 50,000 people in the Serapedala gold mine is shocking enough. They include farmers and unemployed intellectuals, just like purgatory on earth. "What really enslaves these people is what's in the bag." It can be seen that behind the photos is people's desire for gold and wealth. The photos convey the stories that the photographer wants us to see. As said in the documentary, every photographer can shoot the same thing with the same angle and meaning, forming his own unique perspective. This is also the beauty of photography.

What impressed me the most was the part of the refugees in the middle. He processed all the photos into black and white. In the part of the refugees, it is hard to imagine that there will be any other colors besides black and white. The torture of hunger, sickness, and cold made death so commonplace. People who have experienced it themselves are like this. The father threw the child to the corpse stall with a blank face, the forklift that shoveled the corpse, and faced death again and again, but in the end there was only numbness to death. The audience was also numb. I was still scared when I saw the first picture of a child leaving this world with his eyes open, and then one after another. Coffins can be reused. It turns out that people can really suffer from skin and bones. Although they are black and white photos, they are still shocked by the bloody picture in front of them, but they are slowly getting used to it visually... People are complicated. Yes, they are both kind and cruel.

Then I began to think about what role humans played in this catastrophe. They are the sufferers and the initiators. The first half is heavy and depressing, and the second half takes us to see another world, returning to the original. I still sigh that this world is very wonderful, with fiery wars, peaceful and busy city life, pure primitive tribes, they actually happened at the same time, in different corners of the earth. The salt of the earth, human beings are that grain of salt. When I looked at the photos of gold panning and refugees, I felt the insignificance of human beings, but it was just a grain of salt, insignificant. Sebastian takes the audience to face the darkness and gives us light and hope at the end. Plant trees, when wild animals return to the forest again, a grain of salt is not a small thing. Likewise, when policymakers make decisions that change the fate of the planet, a grain of salt is not to be taken lightly. "We are fully capable of restoring the Earth that has been destroyed."

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Extended Reading

The Salt of the Earth quotes

  • Sebastião Salgado - Photographer: We are a ferocious animal. We humans are terrible animals. Our history is a history of wars. It's an endless story, a tale of madness.

  • Sebastião Salgado - Photographer: To think that these three-month-old trees will reach their apex in 400 years. Perhaps from there we could try to grasp the concept of eternity. Maybe eternity is measurable.