nashan nelleynah ulanee
Gabriel Litke
The first documentary that we want to recommend is the one titled Tales By Light. This one already has 2 seasons and each one of them consists of 6 episodes of approximately 20 minutes. In each of these episodes, the viewer will be able to accompany famous photographers on their trips to the most unknown and remote places to search for the most impressive images.
Through these stories, you will not only be able to discover new places but also, you will be able to learn about what technique to use and how certain landscapes should be photographed through great photographers.
Finding Vivian Maier tells the story of an auction where John Maloof bought an archive of previously unpublished photographs. The archive belonged to Vivian Maier, a hitherto anonymous photographer who had captured life on the streets of Chicago and New York from the 1950s to the 1990s. Thanks to the more than 100,000 photographs Maier captured, she became an icon of street photography.
Hondros is the next documentary that we want to include in this short list. It is directed by Greg Campbell and narrates the life and photographic career of the famous war photographer Chris Hondros, who was assassinated in Libya in 2011.
B-Sides by Elsa Dorfman is another of the documentaries that you cannot miss since it shows the life, work and study of Elsa Dorfman, who is a well-known photographer known for her images captured with a Polaroid.
This great documentary is from Yann Arthus-Bertrand, one of the best-known photographers, film directors and environmental activists. Through this documentary, he intends to mobilize society so that it becomes aware of the planet we live on, that it has limited resources.
With more than 40 years of experience, Salgado shows his best photos of his great works such as Trabajadores, Exodos or Gnesis. Through this sample, the viewer will be able to understand what makes the photographer take those photos.
The first one we want to comment on is the film of The Photographer of Mauthausen since this film about photography is based on real events. Specifically, it tells the story of Francisco Boix, a Spanish Republican fighter and photographer who was interned in the Mauthausen concentration camp during World War II.
David Baile is one of the most influential photographers and fundamentally of the second half of the 20th century. He has written numerous books, documentaries and exhibitions since he has been one of the photographers who has best known how to portray the social and visual changes in photography and fashion during the sixties.
The next photographer we want to recommend is Steve McCurry. This one, known worldwide since he is the author of the photograph The Afghan Girl which appeared in the National Geographic magazine in 1985. As a result, he has become a great icon in the history of photography.
This is an old series by the BBC in 1983 that features interview with then contemporary photographers. Most of them were still alive back then, and contains the photographers themselves or relatives talking about them.
While these documentaries offer insights and information about the photographers and their work, they do not offer a step-by-step framework to do street photography. If you want a method that makes outstanding street photography, check out the Photactic Street Photography Course.
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Our list below contains some real crackers, from Exposing Muybridge (starring Gary Oldman) to the documentary classic Finding Vivian Maier and the all-time great feature City of God. All of them great watches and use the lens of photography to explore wider themes, from global warming to album covers.
What's the Daguerrotype process, other than a great name for a prog band? It was the chemical method developed by French artist and physicist Louis Daguerre, which ultimately became the first commercial photographic process and, you know, pretty much laid the groundwork for 20th century photography. Not bad work for a Monday, as it was on 19 August 1839.
'Exposing Muybridge' assembles a charismatic raft of art historians and Muybridge fans, including the actor Gary Oldman, to bring the cinema pioneer's story to life. There's analysis of Muybridge's landscape photography techniques in comparison to greats like Ansel Adams. But this biography also has enough to impress non-photography fans or anyone who's seen Jordan Peele's Nope, which features 'A Horse in Motion' in its early scenes. The ideal taster for what is surely an inevitable biopic.
Wildlife photography demands serious patience, which some find dull and others see as a magical doorway to philosophical musings about life itself. If you're in the latter camp, you'll love this documentary about the quest of wildlife photographer Vincent Munier and the travel writer Sylvain Tesson to find the rare, and seemingly mythical, Tibetan snow leopard.
It might have Planet Earth-level cinematography, but that's where the similarities end. Instead, the The Velvet Queen marries a slow, meandering pace with a beautiful soundtrack from Nick Cave and Warren Ellis to create a hypnotic journey inside the heart of photojournalism.
The series is divided into distinct categories, including album cover art, music posters, touring photography and magazine covers, and ends with a look at how photography fits in with contemporary music and culture.
Abstract: The Art of Design is a Netflix docuseries, with two seasons, putting the spotlight on the creative process of some of the most influential figures in fields such as graphic design, product design and yes, you guessed it, photography. The 45-minute episode in question (S1E07) turns the lens on Platon Antoniou, a world-renowned photographer infamous for his studio portraits of world-leaders and celebrities in music, movies and sports, that have decorated the covers of Time, Wired and Rolling Stone magazines to name a few.
It's sometimes a difficult watch, but this powerful portrait of Brazilian photojournalist Sebastio Salgado is essential viewing. Few camera-wielders, perhaps aside from Don McCullin (see below), have witnessed the harrowing sights that Salgado has documented in his work across Brazil, Rwanda and Papua. And even fewer are able to articulate their roots as engagingly as this master photographer and economist.
While Salgado is clearly has great compassion for his subjects, his experiences also compel him to call human history "a tale of madness" and label our species as "ferocious, terrible animals". After watching this, it's hard to disagree, but this powerful, monochromatic documentary does also let in some rays of optimistic light to balance out the human darkness.
Vivian Maier's legend is as strong today as when her story first leapt from some undeveloped negatives, which were unearthed during the making of this 2013 documentary. The New York nanny wasn't, it turns out, simply a reclusive oddball, but one of the best street photographers of the last century.
This timelapse-fest might have been shot with a batch of relatively old Nikon D200s, but its theme is still very current. Chasing Ice's arresting 'portraits' of receding glaciers highlight one of the most visible manifestations of global warming, which is throwing up ever more extreme weather events ten years on.
Rather than bash you over the head with its message, this documentary calmly lets its lead photographer James Balog and, more importantly his incredible timelapses, do the talking. His 'Extreme Ice Survey' study was a bit more complicated than your average Raspberry Pi project, but the team's patience is rewarded with some startling footage that includes a Manhattan-sized glacier imploding on film.
A powerful film that's as hard-hitting as the photojournalist's war photos, this moving documentary explores how Don McCullin took some of his most famous shots in conflicts in places like Vietnam, Cambodia and Northern Ireland.
McCullin is the perfect subject for a photography documentary and not just because he's so often been on the frontline of 20th century history. He's as candid about the shots he didn't take as the ones he did, and the result is an insightful look at the fine line between empathy and voyeurism.
The good thing about film photography is that its slow pace of development is a handy plot device for creating dramatic tension. Particularly when the film in question can only be processed by a single lab that's about to be closed down forever.
That's the crux of Kodachrome, a photography-themed road movie that stars Ed Harris and Jason Sudeikis as a father-son duo who face a race to get to Kansas before terminal illness and the march of technology extinguish some precious family memories. It might not reinvent the genre, but Kodachrome's strong acting and cinematography make it a visually stunning tribute to the titular film stock.
It may have divided critics at the time of its release in 2013, but we remain fans of this warm-hearted profile of a staffer at the iconic Life Magazine. The titular character (played by Ben Stiller) is on a quest to find a missing film negative, which is to be used for the cover of the last-ever print version of the magazine.
Almost exactly 20 years on from its release in Brazil, City of God stands up as a classic coming-of-age tale that follows a budding photographer who's drawn into documenting Rio's slum gangs and drug-fuelled violence.
While the narrator's photographic skills are central, so too is City of God's cinematography, with its shaky handheld style creating a documentary feel that captures the energy and chaos of the streets. If you enjoyed Netflix's Top Boy, then this all-time great gangster movie is a must-watch.
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