Salt (ATOM Study Guide)

This exquisite film follows award-winning and internationally renowned photo artist, Murray Fredericks, on his annual pilgrimage to the heart of Lake Eyre. Fredericks has been camping alone on the lake, located in the remote north corner of South Australia, for up to five weeks at a time, every year for the past six years. Salt is the name of the ongoing photographic series that he has produced on these journeys over that time. His work captures the essence of vast space and emptiness, while challenging the conventions of traditional landscape photography.

Salt the film interweaves Fredericks' sublime pictures with innovative time-lapse sequences and video-diary excerpts. Alone on the most featureless landscape on earth, Fredericks' video diary captures the beauty of this bleak, empty and desolate environment. With life stripped back to essentials, Fredericks' emotional and mind-altering journey is told through a fusion of recorded reflections and satellite phone conversations with his wife and family at home in Sydney. In these ways, the film poetically examines the personal journey of the artist, the creative process and the landscape itself.

Told with subtlety and dry humour, Salt is ultimately the story of what emanates from emptiness. By combining the breathtaking imagery of this surreal landscape with the hauntingly delicate sounds of Aajinta's Harmonic Spheres, the film, like Fredericks' photographs, attempts to identify what lies beneath the surface of our reality and how 'something' can be produced from 'nothing'. Totally isolated, with only the horizon line as his reference point, Fredericks is forced to contend with the environmental elements of rain, mud, lightning, equipment failure and the ever-intrusive salt. The resulting photographs are not just images of a remote and other-worldly location – they are still points that punctuate the film's voyage into the artist's mind and spirit.

This beautiful film deserves to be seen by as wide an audience as possible. It could be used at all levels of secondary Art and Media Studies, English (identity, character study, the artist and the pursuit of art, human in the environment), Geography and SOSE. Beyond that, the film is spellbinding in its beauty and has an enchanted quality that makes it accessible for a range of ages (including primary school levels).