documentary

The Tower of David in the Venezuelan capital city of Caracas is an unfinished skyscraper and the third tallest building in the country. The construction of the tower came to an abrupt halt in 1994 due to the Venezuelan banking crisis, and it was quickly taken over by squatters. Thus, for years the building was known as the "tallest slum in the world."

24-year-old photographer Alejandro Cegarra spent time with the residents and documented their way of life through images. The resulting project is titled, "The Other Side of the Tower."

Watches, glasses and combs... these are the kinds of everyday objects that photographer Ziyah Gafić has spent a great deal of time photographing over the past few years. They're objects that are seemingly mundane and unimportant, but in fact tell a tragic story that Gafić's work seeks to reveal and preserve.

Get the tissues ready, because this one is aiming right for the feels. Tucked away within a documentary on the history of Japanese cameras, this touching story of Yoko and Minoru Tanaka took us completely unawares.

We thought we were watching a mildly interesting and informative documentary... as it turns out, it was much more than that.

A month ago we shared with you a video documenting the story behind the ‘lost’ negatives famed conflict photographer Robert Capa captured on D-Day.

In the documentary, there’s a moment where the empty rolls of film are shown, emulsion gone and the plastic worn and tattered. Many of us probably didn’t think twice about the negatives that were shown, but A.D. Coleman and Rob McElroy did, and what they found out was a bit shocking, especially coming from a publication as respected as TIME.

Earlier this year, renowned Cape Town photography store Orms developed their last roll of slide film through the E6 process. To bring the era of a legendary process to a proper close, Hero AV brought together a short documentary depicting three photographers who were asked to shoot the last of the slide film that would be developed at the lab.

Willard Psychiatric Center began its life in 1869 as Willard Asylum for the Insane, closing down over 125 years later in 1995. Thousands of long-term patients passed through its doors, and when the center was shut down, it was discovered that hundreds of suitcases belonging to some of its earliest residents had been set aside and forgotten in one of the hospital's attics.

Those suitcases and their contents have been preserved, catalogued and, thanks to photographer Jon Crispin and his compelling Willard Asylum Suitcases series, now they have been photographed as well.

Born in Jerusalem, Israel, Michelle Frankfurter is a documentary photographer from Takoma Park, MD. Before settling in the Washington, DC area, Frankfurter spent three years living in Nicaragua where she worked as a stringer for the British news agency, Reuters and with the human rights organization Witness For Peace documenting the effects of the contra war on civilians.

Since 2000, Frankfurter has concentrated on the border region between the United States and Mexico, and on themes of migration.

Diving into the latest exhibition from Vietnamese American fine arts photographer Dinh Q. Lê, Walley Films created this short doc to tell the story behind the beautiful art project Crossing the Farther Shore.

Lytro recently created a fascinating documentary to show off the capabilities of its new Illum camera.

By teaming up with five different photographers, all from different styles of work, the company was able to capture how this new approach to photography can be used to turn a photograph into something more... an experience.

It was the year 1974 when Jamaican reggae king Bob Marley met a young, 16-year old photographer by the name of Dennis Morris. Marley was enamored by Morris from the start, and their relationship quickly blossomed into a friendship which would last for many years to come.

The above video, titled “Bob Marley: Giant,” documents that friendship by sharing the story of Bob Marley's life through Morris' eyes and viewfinder.

We've been told again and again that gear only matters far down the road, like last step down the road, once all of your skill and creativity has already been put to use.

The aerial photography work of Edward Burtynsky is spectacular. So much so that Canadian filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal and Nick de Pencier -- the creators of the Burtynsky documentary Manufactured Landscapes -- are featuring him in yet another visual stunner called Watermark.

If you're commissioned to make an ad for a major camera company, might we make a small suggestion? Don't show any cameras. It might seem like a stupid idea on the surface, but when you consider the effectiveness of the Canon ad we shared a couple of weeks ago and this Pentax ad we're sharing today, you might just agree with us.

Marine biologist turned photographer Thomas Peschak spent some time documenting the remote atolls of Bassas de India and Europa, known to be home of some of the most beautiful seascapes in the world.

While doing so, cameraman Dan Beecham and writer Sunnye Collins created a behind the scenes video showing how Peschak went about capturing the beautiful scenery.

In the (slightly paraphrased) words of rapper and former Pimp My Ride host Xzibit, "Yo dawgs, we heard you liked the Nikon D4s, so here's a video about the D4s, shot on a D4s".

Apparently the newest, coolest way to show off your new camera is by sending it up with some professional skydivers and telling them to have at it. Okay, maybe it's too early to spot a trend, but Nikon did recently decide to follow in Sony's footsteps and send a couple of D5300s up with a pro skydive photographer to show them off.

Dave Jordano is an award-winning documentary photographer based in Chicago, IL. Jordano has exhibited widely and his work is in several private, corporate and museum collections, most notably The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Detroit Institute of Arts.

He published his first book titled “Articles of Faith” in April 2009 by The Center for American Places, Columbia College Press. His current project, Detroit: Unbroken Down, documents the cultural and societal identity of his hometown, Detroit.

Those readers who often find themselves afflicted with a serious case of wanderlust might want to avoid this post. In the 10-minute documentary above, director Charlene Winfred will take you on a journey with self-proclaimed "gypsy" and "nomad" photographer Flemming Bo Jensen that will have you reaching for your camera gear with one hand while you shop for plane tickets online with the other.

Congratulations, new adopters of film photography -- you're now officially a subculture!

The defining point, of course, is having an independent documentary film about your movement, and that's just what mail-order processor Indie Film Lab is doing with "Long Live Film."

The world of photography holds many untold stories of men and women who had a profound impact on the lives of the people on the other side of their lens. One such man was Dublin street photographer Arthur Fields, and an Irish production company wants to tell his story, with a little help from you.

So you want to create stirring nature documentaries. You could go the National Geographic way and risk trench-foot, snakebite and more in pursuit of the scenic wild. Or you could take the Boris Godfroid route: Schlep a few hundred pounds of bricks into a spare room, cover it with moss and other forgiving plant life, and let nature run wild in miniature.

There's no doubt about that fact that street photography is wildly interesting. There's just so much to it that makes it appealing. Real people, real moments -- good and bad. Best of all, there's something new to capture every day. And while many of us don't have the courage to get out there and point our camera at a stranger, it's interesting to see it happen, especially in a metropolis.

Filmmaker Cheryl Dunn (who is a street photographer herself) is working on a documentary called Everybody Street, which features the master street photographers in America's most populated city -- New York City. The trailer above gives a taste of what it's about (note: it's slightly NSFW).

It's the weekend, which means we get a chance to share something inspirational with you that you might not otherwise have the time to sit down and enjoy in the middle of the week. This week's contender is an hour-long documentary, put together by the BBC One show Imagine..., about legendary photographer and filmmaker William Klein.

In honor of Memorial Day, a couple of months ago, the folks behind the Sundance Film Festival decided to dig up a short honorable mention winner from 2007 and put it up on YouTube. Called Spitfire 944, the film show WWII Photo Reconnaissance pilot Lt Col. John S. Blyth telling his story and reacting to footage of a crash landing he made all the way back in 1944 that he had never seen before.

Don McCullin is a photojournalism icon. He's spent his life chasing haunting images that, more often than not, he's succeeded in capturing. And even though his career has taken him all over the world -- to Cyprus, the Congo, Biafra, Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh, El Salvador, and the Middle East among others -- one thing has sed the same throughout his journeys: he's always shot film.

In this short documentary put together for Canon Professional Network by ICE Productions, he takes his first go at using a digital camera and discovers the potential (and potential pitfalls) of the technology.

Vivian Maier never saw much recognition for her work. When she passed away four years ago in 2009, her treasure trove of over 150,000 photographs had only just been discovered by accident, and didn't begin receiving critical acclaim until after she had already passed.

Called a "poet of suburbia," this nanny photographer -- "Mary Poppins with a camera" -- is now one of the most celebrated photographers of our time, and this hour-long BBC One documentary takes a closer look at her story.

In April of this year, I travelled to the Indonesian capital of Jakarta for the first time. I was excited to visit this new city and start to photograph in one of the world’s most underreported emerging economies. I had read stories about the city’s challenges with water and flooding, which is why I wanted to photograph there and continue my work on environmental issues in developing nations. I wasn’t prepared for the shocking scenes that I was to witness in my time in the city.

Photographer Rachel Elizabeth Seed never got to meet her mother. Also a photographer, her mother Sheila passed away when Seed was only 18 months old, and now she's on a quest to reconnect with her all these years later by creating the documentary film A Photographic Memory.

Life magazine believed that pictures could change the world. And so, during the 40s, 50s and 60s, when the United States was at its most dynamic, Life provided the illustrations for the story of America.

Famed fashion photographer John Rankin Waddell and BBC Four went in search of the people who did this -- the photographers who led the charge and turned Life into a photojournalistic superpower. The documentary America in Pictures: The Story of Life Magazine (shown in its entirety above) is the result of that search.

AP Photographer David Guttenfelder is a conflict photographer. He's spent much of his photographic career capturing war through the lens of his camera. One thing he certainly never considered himself was a bird photographer.

But when he was sent on an assignment to illustrate a National Geographic piece on the illegal hunting of songbirds, he became one. And it slowly dawned on him that he wasn't just doing a documentary, environmental, or conservation piece -- this was simply another form of conflict photography.

Jacob A. Riis arrived in New York in 1870. As the economy slowed, the Danish American photographer found himself among the many other immigrants in the area whose daily life consisted of joblessness, hunger, homelessness, and thoughts of suicide. So when he finally found work as a police reporter in 1877, he made it his mission to reveal the crime and poverty of New York City's East Side slum district to the world.

"I've concentrated on the poor ... the rich ones have their own photographers." Those words, spoken by the late great Milton Rogovin, begin the award-winning short documentary The Forgotten Ones.

Due to the evaporation of funding that supports mental health facilities, many prisons across the United States have been given the extra duty of treating those who are mentally ill. These patient-prisoners are often trapped within the systems with no where else to go for better treatment.

Trapped is a project by Minneapolis, Minnesota-based photographer Jenn Ackerman that shares the experiences of these prisoners through gritty black-and-white photographs.

Dutch artist Berndnaut Smilde's photos of clouds hanging mysteriously in indoor locations have earned him a good bit of popularity. Created by using a smoke machine, precise atmospheric conditions and dramatic lighting, his Nimbus photos juxtapose the indoor and outdoor worlds.

In the short documentary video above, Smilde sat down with Avant/Garde Diaries and discussed his work, lending us some perspective on why he creates these photos and where he finds inspiration.

A couple of years ago, Irina Werning burst into the public eye when her series Back to the Future went viral. What started as a project were she would have relatives in Buenos Aires reenact old photos of themselves, has since expanded to a photographic phenomenon that has taken her all over the world.

The short documentary above gives us a chance to hear Werning's thoughts on the project: why she does it, how she puts the shots together, and whether or not she ever feels the project will truly be over.

A few years ago we shared photographer Richard Mosse's unique infrared imagery that he had shot in The Democratic Republic of Congo for his series Infra. Taking advantage of an old type of Kodak film called Aerochrome, he infused new color into this war-torn and often forgotten part of the Earth.

Now he's taken that project a step further by creating a documentary film called The Enclave. Shot entirely on 16mm Aerochrome film, the footage reveals both the unseen infrared bouncing off of the vegetation, and this too-often unseen "ongoing humanitarian disaster."

Photographer Jason D. Page came to light painting by accident. Carrying his camera down the beach on a full moon night, he was taking long exposure of the water when he accidentally bumped his tripod -- from that moment on, he was hooked. But the reasons why light painting was able to have such an instant and significant impact on his life go much deeper than the accidental discovery of a cool technique.

In this short documentary, Page talks about his passion in depth, explaining how light painting works and giving us a glimpse into the dark past that drove him to ultimately 'see the light.'

Instagram is a lot of things: a photography app, a social network, a way to express yourself and a cause for headaches for the photographers who aren't trilled by the concept. For the most adamant of Instagram users, however, Instagram is a community.

And it's that community that filmmaker Paul Tellefsen sought to connect with when he chose to create the above short documentary Instagram is.

The National Socialist Movement held their 2013 national convention in Atlanta, Georgia, protesting undocumented immigration and contemporary political policies. The NSM boasts of being the nation's largest "white civil rights groups" and aligns itself with other like-minded individuals across the nation. Spanning across the majority of the 50 states, the NSM retains its presence through regional and local leaders.

Here's a look at the convention and how I documented it through photographs earlier this year.

Have you heard of Sid Kaplan? If you've studied the works of great American photographers, you've likely at least seen some of Kaplan's handiwork. Although he's a master photographer in his own right, Kaplan had made a name for himself as one of the industry's finest photo printers. Over the past four or five decades, Kaplan has made prints for some of the biggest names in photography.