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This paper examines self-reflexive meditation on the ethics of documentary photography in Wim Wenders and Juliano Ribeiro Salgado’s documentary The Salt of the Earth (2014). The documentary is analysed through the lens of aesthetic witnessing, which treats visual beauty and ethical responsibility as compatible rather than opposite. Drawing on Ariella Azoulay’s concept of the civil contract of photography and Susan Sontag’s warnings about the numbing effects of aestheticised suffering, the paper argues that the central formal device of The Salt of the Earth (i.e., Salgado narrating his own photographs from inside a darkened room) stages a debate that existing scholarship on his work has largely conducted separately. By examining this particular debate, the paper offers a close reading/analysis of the photographs from the Serra Pelada, Sahel, Rwanda, and Bihar sequences. Furthermore, The Salt of the Earth honours the civil contract of Azoulay at the level of production while leaving open, and in the Rwanda sequence actively testing, the limits Sontag identifies in the numbing effects of aestheticisation. The documentary reaches its own exhaustion and makes its most significant contributions to current debates on photographic ethics.
Dr Suraj Soni. “Aesthetic Witnessing and Its Limitation in Sebastião Salgado’s The Salt of the Earth.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 4, August 2026, pp. 645-660. DOI, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n4.39.
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