Salgado has taken his camera to more than 100 countries.
The century so far has been blessed with great documentary films about photographers: whether in war zones (James Nachtwey and Tim Hetherington); the streets of New York (Bill Cunningham); shooting industrial landscapes (Edward Burtynsky) or celebs (Annie Leibovitz).
The second (after Finding Vivian Maier) of this year's Oscar-nominated documentaries to
concentrate on the work of a photographer, this film shines a light on the great Brazilian-born, Paris-based shooter Sebastiao Salgado.
His celebrated images of victims of famine in Africa are his best known, although this film, co-directed by the subject's son and the veteran German maestro Wenders, charts a 40-year career that has taken him to more than 100 countries.
To say that the images on show are astounding is to undersell them, although their richness underlines the inadequacy of the movies to do justice to the still image; the camera cannot linger long enough - although the big-screen format makes up for that somewhat.
Shooting always in black and white, Salgado takes us deep into some of the world's hellholes. The crowded chaos of the hand-worked Serra Pelada gold mine in his native country and the burning oil wells of post-Gulf War Kuwait - have a medieval tinge to them, part-Bosch, part-Tarkovsky. Yet he also finds beauty in the silver-armoured talon of a Galapagos iguana or basking Arctic walruses (the scene in which they must wait for a polar bear to move on is both awe-inspiring and faintly hilarious).
