Salgado: The Spectre of Hope

Sebastião Salgado is coming to Watershed on Sunday 8 November for Salgado: The Spectre of Hope, a film that puts his photography in conversation with the writer and painter John Berger. It's part of John Berger at 100, the season Watershed is running to mark the centenary of his birth, so the whole thing sits within that wider look at his life and work.

Salgado is one of the most recognised documentary photographers working today, and his work has always been about the big, sweeping stories — migration, labour, the environment. This film brings his images together with Berger's voice and ideas, so it's as much a dialogue between two very different ways of seeing the world as it is a showcase of the photographs themselves. If you've come across Salgado's work before, you'll know it's rarely small-scale; he works in vast landscapes and with huge groups of people, and the film follows that same scale.

The session doesn't start with the film, though. It opens with an introductory talk, which sets the scene before the screening begins. Between the talk and the film, there's plenty of time to get your head around the connection between Salgado's images and Berger's writing before the images take over the screen.

It's on at Watershed in Bristol on Sunday 8 November, starting at 14:00.