Annie Leibovitz: Life through a Lens [2006]
A documentary about the life and work of the iconic American photographer - directed by her sister, Barbara Leibovitz. Almost as famous as the people she photographs, Annie Leibovitz is one of America's most celebrated portrait photographers, capturing her subjects from Demi Moore and Nicole Kidman to the George W. Bush cabinet with often theatrical or provocative imagination, her work regularly adorning the covers of Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair and the New Yorker since the early 1980s. Annie's own life has been private and protected, but this documentary feature follows Annie Leibovitz's career of more than 30 years, reflecting on the influence of her relationship with partner Susan Sontag, and featuring interviews with Graydon Carter, Rosanne Cash, Hillary Rodham Clinton,Whoopi Goldberg, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Yoko Ono and Arnold Schwarzenegger, Gloria Steinem and AnnaWintour.
Manufactured Landscapes [2006]
It is the striking new documentary on the world and work of renowned artist Edward Burtynsky. Internationally acclaimed for his large-scale photographs of “manufactured landscapes”—quarries, recycling yards, factories, mines and dams—Burtynsky creates stunningly beautiful art from civilization’s materials and debris. The film follows him through China, as he shoots the evidence and effects of that country’s massive industrial revolution. With breathtaking sequences, such as the opening tracking shot through an almost endless factory, the filmmakers also extend the narratives of Burtynsky’s photographs, allowing us to meditate on our impact on the planet and witness both the epicentres of industrial endeavour and the dumping grounds of its waste. In the spirit of such environmentally enlightening sleeper-hits, Manufactured Landscapes powerfully shifts our consciousness about the world and the way we live in it, without simplistic judgments or reductive resolutions.
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William Eggleston in the Real World [2005]
Michael Almereyda’s award-winning documentary William Eggleston in the Real World reveals the deep connection between photographer William Eggleston’s enigmatic personality and his groundbreaking work, and also reveals his parallel commitments as a musician, draftsman and videographer. Almereyda tracks the photographer on trips to Kentucky, Los Angeles and New York, but gives particular attention to downtime in Memphis, Eggleston’s home base. Eggleston has been called “the beginning of modern colour photography” (John Szarkowski, MoMA) and “one of the most significant figures in contemporary photography”.
Contacts, Vol. 1: The Great Tradition of Photojournalism [2005]
Contacts, Vol. 2: The Renewal of Contemporary Photography
Contacts, Vol. 3: Conceptual Photography
By asking some of the world's greatest photographers to explain their most intriguing pieces, this fascinating series of short films offers a behind-the-scenes look at the true nature of the artistic process. Each artist provides commentary on the methods and complex layers of thought used to produce an array of prints, slides, proofs and contact sheets, transporting the viewer into a secret realm of creativity.
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Henri Cartier-Bresson: the Impassioned Eye [2003]
"Taking pictures means holding your breath with all your faculties concentrated on capturing a fleeting reality," declares the pioneering photojournalist Henri Cartier-Bresson near the end of Heinz Butler's austere documentary portrait. In this small but stately film, completed a year before the pioneering photojournalist Henri Cartier-Bresson's death at 95 in August 2004, he slowly leafs through volumes of his black-and-white photographs, shows some of his later drawings and muses on his art to the severe, prickly strains of Bach piano music. Even when viewed second-hand in a movie, these photographs are something to see. Their formal elegance is balanced by an intense, pulsing humanity. The documentary, which subscribes to the Great Man school of reverential portraiture, is not a biography but an interview (in French, simultaneously translated into English) conceived as a master class on art appreciation, with guest commentators augmenting Cartier-Bresson's own sparsely chosen words.
American Experience: Ansel Adams [2002]
A Documentary Film written and directed by Ric Burns and co-produced by Sierra Club Productions and Steeplechase Films. For the centennial of the artist's birth, Burns has created an elegant, moving, and lyrical portrait of this quintessentially American photographer. The documentary weaves together archival footage, photographic images, dramatic readings of the artist's own writing, and interviews with leading photographers, historians, curators, naturalists, as well as Adams's family, friends, and colleagues, to tell the story of a man who was at once a visionary photographer, a pioneer in photographic technique, and an ardent crusader for the cause of environmentalism.
War Photographer [2001]
In this engrossing, Academy Award-nominated documentary, director Christian Frei follows photojournalist James Nachtwey into the world's combat zones as he fights to capture the struggles of those who face harrowing violence in places such as Kosovo, Indonesia and the West Bank. Nachtwey skirts through murky politics to tell the stories of the suffering in hopes that he can bring attention to their plight, one picture at a time.
The Adventure of Photography: 150 Years of the Photographic Image [1998]
This dizzying four-hour retrospective explores the history of photography by zipping through more than 1,700 images -- ranging from early daguerreotypes to nudes to modern photojournalism -- snapped by 300 shutterbugs. Charting the development of various schools of thought and photography styles, the documentary highlights the work of Man Ray, Ansel Adams, Richard Avedon, George Eastman, Max Ernst, Eadweard Muybridge, Andy Warhol and more.
Strand: Under the Dark Cloth [1989]
Although his influence on the history of photography has been nothing short of profound, Paul Strand (1890-1976) remains a curiously shrouded and paradoxical figure. While passionately devoted to humanity, he was happiest in the isolation of the darkroom. A pioneer filmmaker, (Manhatta, Native Land, Heart of Spain, The Wave), he found the process of collaboration painful. Strand established himself in New York in the 1920s as a master of light and structure, with his now famous photo of Wall Street inspired by the forms and movement of European modernist painters such as Matisse and Picasso. His closeup portraits and landscapes were equally profound. John Walker's Strand: Under the Dark Cloth is a documentary that is "beautifully crafted, thoroughly researched and intimately recounted" (Variety) with generous amounts of Strand's most famous photographs, clips from his films and collaborators including Fred Zinnemann, Cesare Zavattini and Georgia O'Keeffe.
Masters of Photography: Andre Kertesz [1978]
Filmed during the last decade of Andre Kertesz's life, this documentary presents the artist in his own words, explaining his photographs and sharing memories of the life that produced them. Famous for his distorted nudes and his many photographs of his beloved Washington Square Park (which he looked down on from his New York apartment), Kertesz is considered one of the fathers of fine-art photography and photojournalism.
Masters of Photography: Edward Steichen [1964]
At age 86, Edward Steichen reflects on a career that ranged from portraiture and photomurals to fashion and combat photography in this documentary. Steichen -- who described his medium as "both ridiculously easy and impossibly difficult" -- was one of the 20th century's greatest photographers, as famous for his portraits of artists such as George Gershwin and Greta Garbo as he was for his pioneering work in aerial photography during World War II.