"If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough." —Robert Capa
The photographers featured in these films have all mastered the art of what makes for a good picture. From a portrait of Robert Frank, who produced the important book, The Americans, to Gerda Taro, whose wartime work with Robert Capa has only recently been discovered, these photographers have created images that will resonate for generations.
Directed by Sasha Waters Freyer • Documentary • With Matthew Weiner, Laurie Simmons • 2018 • 91 minutes
Described as a poet and philosopher of street photography, Garry Winogrand captured the American '60s and ‘70s. His Leica M4 snapped spontaneous images of everyday people, from the Mad Men era...
Directed by Gerald Fox • Documentary • With Robert Frank, June Leaf • 2019 • 86 minutes
Completed in 2004, Leaving Home, Coming Home: A Portrait of Robert Frank was the first ever feature-length documentary about the legendary Swiss-American photographer and filmmaker. Originally deemed too pers...
Directed by Chris Marker, Yannick Bellon • Documentary • 2001 • 42 minutes
Chris Marker's "cine-essay" is dense and demanding, a splendid reminder of the agility, poetry, and power of his nimble, capacious mind.
Ostensibly a portrait of photographer Denise Bellon, focusing on the two decades be...
Directed by C. Scott Willis • Documentary • With Betty Woodman, Francesca Woodman, Charles Woodman George Woodman • 2010 • 83 minutes
The tragic story of Francesca Woodman, a young photographer renowned for her extraordinary nude self-portraits, is also the story of her brilliantly artistic fami...
Directed by Susan Vogel • Documentary • 2006 • 8 minutes
Malick Sidibé started out as a local photographer in Bamako, Mali. After independence in 1960, his snazzy studio portraits and party shots captured the buoyant optimism of a new nation. Today they are recognized internationally as masterpi...
Directed by Brenda Longfellow • Documentary • 2004 • 60 minutes
A new independent feature documentary by acclaimed Canadian director Brenda Longfellow, TINA IN MEXICO, follows the tumultuous and epic story of Tina Modotti, revolutionary, bohemian spirit and renowned photographer, acclaimed for h...
Directed by Camille Ménager • Documentary • 2021 • 58 minutes
SEARCHING FOR GERDA TARO celebrates the life and work of Taro — a charismatic Jewish refugee from Germany, an anti-fascist, and a trailblazing photographer whose work would be forgotten for decades.
In 1935, Taro (then going by her b...
Directed by Paul Carlin • Documentary • With John Berger, Sebastiao Salgado • 2001 • 52 minutes
Over the past 30 years Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado's work has won every major award for excellence. More importantly, his photographs have had an actual impact on the world and how it is ...
Directed by Gavin Hodge & Tim Morrison • Documentary • With Gavin Hodge • 1991 • 26 minutes
Documentary tracing the development of Photomontage, based on the pioneering work of John Heartfield, through to the contemporary use of these techniques in advertising and video. The film looks at the wo...
Directed by Carroll Parrot Blue • Documentary • 1984 • 28 minutes
'It starts before you snap the shutter... It starts with your sense of what's important.' These are the words of Roy DeCarava, one of the foremost photographic artists of the twentieth century, contributor to the Family of Man exh...
Directed by Jethro Waters • Documentary • 2020 • 80 minutes
F11 AND BE THERE is a commentary on American civil rights, race, social justice, and art, told through the many lenses of legendary photographer Burk Uzzle. With a career that spans 65+ years, Burk Uzzle has created some of the most ico...
Directed by Thomas Allen Harris • Documentary • 2014 • 92 minutes
The first documentary to explore the American family photo album through the eyes of black photographers, Through a Lens Darkly probes the recesses of American history to discover images that have been suppressed, forgotten and lo...
Directed by Lynne Sachs • Documentary • 2004 • 29 minutes
In association with the Center for Southern Folklore, SERMONS AND SACRED PICTURES profiles Reverend L.O. Taylor, a Memphis-based Baptist minister who in the 1930s and 40s built a fiery reputation by lacing his sermons with parables, fable...
Directed by François Lévy-Kuentz • Documentary • 2021 • 53 minutes
A group of friends meet up in the country to spend the summer together. They go to the beach, play cards, and take day trips in the surrounding region. But these aren’t everyday city folk on vacation. The hosts are Pablo Picasso ...
Directed by Stéphanie Colaux and Delphine Deloget • Documentary • 2019 • 26 minutes
This documentary series tells the story of intimate and tumultuous love stories in the context of art history. Each of the couples in this collection answer the same questions: is love compatible with creation? C...
Directed by Laura Mulvey • Documentary • With Miriam Margolyes • 1983 • 29 minutes
This tautly structured documentary sheds light on the work of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo and Italian photographer Tina Modotti, women icons of the Mexican Renaissance. The film not only explores the two women's a...
Directed by Anne Makepeace • Documentary • 2000 • 84 minutes
Edward S. Curtis (1868-1952) was a driven, charismatic, obsessive artist, a pioneer photographer who set out in 1900 to document traditional Indian life. He rose from obscurity to become the most famous photographer of his time, create...
Directed by Ross McElwee • Documentary • 2012 • 87 minutes
Filmmaker Ross McElwee (Sherman’s March, Bright Leaves) finds himself in frequent conflict with his son, a young adult who seems addicted to and distracted by the virtual worlds of the internet. To understand his fractured love for his s...
Directed by Stephen Wilkes • Documentary • With Jay Maisel • 2019 • 79 minutes
JAY MYSELF documents the monumental move of renowned photographer and artist, Jay Maisel, who, in February 2015 after forty-eight years, begrudgingly sold his home—the 36,000 square-foot, 100-year-old landmark buildin...
Directed by Annette Mangaard • Documentary • 2015 • 62 minutes
Photographer Suzy Lake is one of the formative feminist artists to evolve out of the heyday of the 1960’s and the Second Wave. A master of the art of self-portraiture, Lake influenced Cindy Sherman as well as a host of other female a...
Directed by Jerome Clement-Wilz • Documentary • 2015 • 52 minutes
'As it gets harder to sell pictures, we take greater and greater risks,' explains Corentin Fohlen. A war correspondent still in his twenties, Fohlen is part of a new generation of freelance journalists who fly to war zones from Li...
Directed by Raymond Depardon and Claudine Nougaret • Documentary • 2012 • 100 minutes
Travelling alone, internationally acclaimed photographer and filmmaker Raymond Depardon spent six years capturing his home country with a large format camera. This long, solitary road trip provided fertile grou...
