The Salt of the Earth: Study of photographer Sebastiao Salgado, his work underdeveloped

The Salt of the Earth - a Wim Wenders documentary about the life and work of Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Salgado - elegantly inhabits a moral and aesthetic paradox.

Salgado's photos illuminate some of the worst modern horrors: war, starvation, poverty, displacement.

They're also beautiful, dramatic visual artifacts; and their power has a double effect. Viewers are drawn into the contemplation of terrible realities, but their attention also turns to the person bearing witness.

That is not a fault, either in Salgado's lifelong project or in Wenders' consideration of it. It's just a fact of their common vocation.

The filmmaker lends his mellow humanism and globe-trotting curiosity to an appreciative, easygoing dialogue with the photographer's single-minded vision. The two are well-matched.

Although Wenders doesn't appear on camera, he is present as a narrator and a sensibility, recounting his early meetings with Salgado and his work with Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, the photographer's son and the film co-director.

The elder Salgado occupies the screen with quiet charisma. Speaking in French and Portuguese - he left Brazil during the military dictatorship and lived for many years in Paris - he modestly tells the story of an adventurous life.

He was raised in a rural part of central Brazil and trained as an economist before turning to photography - with the support of his wife, Lelia.

Leaving her and the young Juliano for months at a time, Salgado set out to document unexplored aspects of human life, often focusing on remote areas and vulnerable or exploited people.

The Salt of the Earth begins with the contemplation of pictures taken in and around an enormous, open gold mine - a crowded, infernal place in which Salgado's camera discovers humanity in its raw, desperate essence.

Those images were part of Workers: Archaeology of the Industrial Age, a collection published in 1993.

Subsequent projects included Migrations (2000) and Sahel: The End of the Road (2004), whose images of war and famine in Africa are made more wrenching by the photographer's calm, heartbroken narration.

To observe and capture on film the death of another person is disturbing and ethically complex.

The book Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) by Susan Sontag explores how photographs of atrocities both awaken and dull the conscience, creating a sense of immediacy that is also, inevitably, a measure of the distance between the sufferer and the observer.

The Salt of the Earth, a testament to Wenders' admiration for his subject, largely avoids such complications - a perfectly defensible choice but also something of a lost opportunity.

Because they disclose harsh and unwelcome truths, his pictures deserve a harder, more robustly critical look.

The Salt of the Earth. Directed by Juliano Ribeiro Salgado and Wim Wenders.

MPAA rating: PG-13 (for thematic material involving disturbing images of violence and human suffering, nudity)

Running time: 1:50

Showing starting Friday at the Gateway and Lennox 24 theaters