Images That Dare You to Turn Away.
To hell and back describes the psychological journey of the great Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado in the magnificent documentary “The Salt of the Earth.” Directed by Wim Wenders and Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, Mr. Salgado’s son, the film is a crowning moment in DOC NYC, the nonfiction film festival starting on Thursday. Some of Mr. Salgado’s black-and-white photos are grisly, Boschian tableaus of the world’s horrors with the formal beauty and grand composition of paintings by the Renaissance masters.
With its hard-to-reconcile juxtapositions of the beautiful and the grotesque,“The Salt of the Earth” embodies the contradictions of the documentary form itself. In a sense, the entire festival is a journey to hell and back, in which honesty and truthfulness are often in conflict with painful images on which people would rather not dwell. Who really wants to see photos of corpses piled in a church in Rwanda? But once confronted with such images, who would dare look away?
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