documentary

In 1906, etiologist and photographer Edward S. Curtis set out across the United States to draw, photograph and otherwise document the lives of Native Americans that hadn't yet been contacted by Western society.

Funded by J.P. Morgan, he would return 20 years later with over 40,000 photographs, which he used to illustrate his famous 20 volume series "The North American Indian." Only 222 complete sets were ever published (one of which sold last year for $1.44M at auction) and even though it has been criticized by some as misrepresenting the Native American culture at the time, its value as a documentary publication is enormous.

Warning: This article contains powerful and emotional content that may be difficult to view

I knew the first minute I saw Jennifer that she was the one. Jen was beautiful and the kind of person that everyone wants in their life: she listened, and when you talked with her you felt like you were the only person who mattered. 

A few months later I finally worked up the courage to ask Jen out, telling her, "I have a crush on you." At the time Jen was living in New York and I was in Cleveland. We talked on the phone for hours and wanted to know everything about each other; after 6 months of long distance dating I moved to New York.

My name is Chris Rusanowsky, I am a 22-year-old freelance photographer based out of Los Angeles, California. In February of 2012 I took a trip to document poverty in Manila, Philippines for 32 days.

School of Visual Arts photography student Michael Schmidt has been working on a series that documents the commuters who ride the Staten Island Ferry that shuttles people between Staten Island and Manhattan. It's an environment in which people are mostly stationary and often lost in their thoughts or absorbed in the things being displayed on their smartphones.

In the early 2000s, NYC-based photographer Christopher Dawson noticed that even though major events were going on around the world, major news organizations in the US often remained fixed on stories involving the rich and famous. Due to the fact that stories involving celebrities often result in more eyeballs and advertising dollars, things like Britney Spears' custody hearing or Michael Jackson's molestation trial would attract a disproportionate amount of attention.

Starting 2004, Dawson began to create a series of photos with the camera pointed at the newsmakers rather than the stories. The ongoing project is titled "Coverage."

Between 2009 and 2011, Italian photographer Marina Rosso shot images for a photo project showing what life as a married couple looks like after nearly six decades together. Her subjects were Licia and Ryan -- her own grandparents.

New Zealand-based travel photographer Amos Chapple visited Iran on three personal trips between December 2011 and January 2013. While he was there, he photographed the country and its people as he saw them on the ground.

When photographer Mike Brodie was 17 years old, he had his first train hopping experience in his hometown of Pensacola, Florida. Over a number of days, that train would take him to Jacksonville, Florida and then back. It was as short trip, but sparked a lifelong passion for train hopping and exploration in Brodie.

Brodie would then spend more than 10 years exploring the United States through train hopping, hitchhiking, and walking. Throughout his journeys, he would document the lifestyle through photography. Images from 2006 through 2009 have now been compiled into a photo project titled, "A Period of Juvenile Prosperity."

Tom Carter may have seen more of China, its lands, and its people than any other Westerner on record. The American photographer spent two years backpacking across all 33 provinces of China, traveling over 35,000 miles, seeing 56 different cultures, and shooting over 10,000 portraits of the people he met.

If you're going to infiltrate the world of penguins for an up close and personal documentary, you have to get creative. So, wildlife producer John Downer and camera operator Geoff Bell did just that.

By creating undercover cameras shaped as everything from rocks and pieces of ice, to several robotic penguin creations, they were able to get an incredibly intimate look at the lives of the world's best dressed birds.

This 2 minute 39 second video is the official trailer for the upcoming documentary, "Finding Vivian Maier." It tells the story of one of the greatest photography finds in recent history, and of the brilliant work of a photographer no one had heard of just a decade ago.

Jill Conley was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 31. Only six months into her marriage, she and her husband had to go through the horrors of chemo, radiation, a double mastectomy and a problematic reconstruction before she finally entered remission. Now 35, she has been diagnosed with incurable stage 4 bone cancer.

Capitol Hill 60 Minute Photo closed its doors at the end of last year. Given the transformation photography has gone through over the past decade, it hardly came as a surprise. At its core, the success, survival, and eventual demise of 60 Minute Photo is just another familiar story of a business fighting against the moving current of technology. It’s closure, however, reveals something important, something personal. It represents a shift in how we create and preserve our memories and a deepening of the divide between customer and proprietor.

Don McCullin is known the world over for his incredible work as a photojournalist. His powerful and moving photography of devastation and suffering in Cyprus, The Congo, Vietnam and many others have won him worldwide acclaim as one of the greatest ever.

And now, for those who don't know about his life's work, or really anybody who wants to see what being one of the most prolific (and perhaps most haunted) photojournalists of our time means, the documentary 'McCullin' is here to fill you in.

Less than two months after attending the 2011 Academy Awards with his friend and colleague Sebastian Junger, acclaimed photojournalist and filmmaker Tim Hetherington (seen above) died tragically in Misrata, Libya, only minutes away from the hospital.

Over the following year, Junger began a quest to put together Hetherington's final hours by interviewing friends, family, and anybody who could shed light on his life and what had transpired. Being a filmmaker, it seemed only right that he record these interviews.

Motion image photography is a new name for an old concept: pulling stills from video. In fact, famed headshot photographer Peter Hurley took a stab at it last year, pinning the 5K Red Epic against his Hasselblad to see if he could recreate his work in video. The issue there, even ignoring price, was that the sheer size of the Red Epic makes it far too bulky for anything but studio work.

The words "grandma's cooking" often elicits warm feelings and pangs of nostalgia in people, as they're reminded of delicious meals prepared by their grandmother's loving and experienced hands. Italian photographer Gabriele Galimberti wanted to learn what these memories are for people in different cultures and contexts, so he set out to document grandmas and their dishes in countries all across the globe. The result is a project titled "Delicatessen with love."

Brooklyn-based photographer Joey L has spent years working on an amazing set of portraits titled "Holy Men," which features religious ascetics from around the world.

Joey traveled to India (for the third time) in March 2011 and spent a month creating more photos of wandering monks in Varanasi, the holiest of the seven sacred cities in Hinduism and one of the oldest cities in the world. The subjects are men who have renounced all earthly possessions in their pursuit of spiritual liberation.

Perth-based photographer James Fabri sees things a little differently when he looks through the viewfinder of a DSLR. While most photographers can only use half of their regular vision to frame shots, Fabri has the advantage of seeing things the way he normally experiences the world. You see, he only has one eye.

What's it like to shoot on the front lines of battle as a military photojournalist? This 15-minute documentary by filmmaker Hannah Hill will tell you. Here's the video's description:

This is a documentary about Staff Sgt. Ryan Crane, a United States Air Force photojournalist, who has deployed to Afghanistan twice. He shares his experiences as a photojournalist in a combat environment as well as the mental and physical toll it takes on him.

Crane is based out of O’Fallon, Illinois, and has served as a combat cameraman for a Special Forces, photographing the war with a DSLR and an M4.

If you're at all interested in the history of photography, Henry Fox Talbot is a pioneer that you need to be familiar with. Although French pioneer Louis Daguerre is often credited with being "the father of photography," Talbot, based in England, had announced his own photographic process in the same year. Daguerre's daguerreotype process dominated the industry early on, but Talbot's process -- one that involved creating photographic negatives and then printing photos with them -- eventually became the standard model used in the 20th century.

Here's an interesting 26-minute documentary about the life and work of 20th-century-photographer Edward Weston, a man who is considered to be one of the most influential American photographers and one of the masters of photography during his era. The 1948 film, titled "The Photographer," was shot by American filmmaker Willard Van Dyke, an apprentice of Weston's, who went on to become a very notable photographer in his own right.

Self-taught photographer Alexander Deschaumes only started making photos back in 2003, but his dedication to the craft and his thirst for jaw-dropping landscapes have brought him a long way since then. Deschaumes braves extreme weather and hazardous landforms, going to locations that many landscape photographers would never dare venture, all for the sake of his images. The 2-minute video above offers a look into his world of extreme landscape photography.

Earlier this year, we shared a beautiful short documentary, titled "Silver & Light", which featured Los Angeles-based photographer Ian Ruhter and the gigantic wet plate photographs he shoots using a van that he converted into a massive camera. Since then, Ruhter's work has received a good deal of attention; the video now has nearly 1 million views, and Ruhter has been traveling around the country and using his special photography to tell the stories of people he meets.

He has just released the new video above, titled "American Dream." It's an inspiring look at some of Ruhter's first shoots for the project (note: it contains some strong language).

Documentary filmmaker and photography enthusiast Matt Morris recently noticed a magazine article about a tintype photographer named Harry Taylor based in his hometown of Wilmington, NC. Having recently gotten engaged, Morris and his fiancée decided to have Taylor shoot their engagement photos using the 150-year-old photo process. They ended up sitting for a 5-hour-portrait session, and Morris was stunned by the results.

A few months later, he decided to return to Taylors studio with two Canon 5Ds in tow and spent an afternoon documenting Harry's work. The fantastic 4-minute documentary above is what resulted.

Portrait is a new 20-minute documentary film by Columbus, Ohio-based filmmaker Andy Newman that explores the question, "In the age of Instagram, what sets a professional photographer apart?" Newman compares the lives and work of two people who are both crazy about photography, but who have chosen very different careers and mediums.

Mecca in Saudi Arabia is considered to be the holiest city of Islam, and is only accessible to Muslims. 38-year-old London photographer Toufic Beyhum wanted to document what a pilgrimage is like for a Muslim and to "portray the peaceful and spiritual side of Islam", so he brought along a Hasselblad 500 medium-format camera when he visited the city. His images -- a few of which were snapped in locations where photography was prohibited -- offer an intimate look at locations that most people will never be allowed to see in their lifetimes.

Here's an interesting video in which renowned photojournalist Steve McCurry shares some thoughts on documentary portraiture. Titled Close Up: Photographers at Work, the video takes us behind-the-scenes with McCurry as he shoots some candid portraits on the street and then reviews some of his most prized shots captured over the course of his career. (There's a brief glimpse of the original film slides of his iconic Afghan Girl photo.)

Here's the amazing official trailer for the upcoming documentary film Chasing Ice, which follows one man as he embarks on an epic photo project around the world:

In the spring of 2005, National Geographic photographer James Balog headed to the Arctic on a tricky assignment: to capture images to help tell the story of the Earth's changing climate.

[...] Chasing Ice is the story of one man's mission to change the tide of history by gathering undeniable evidence of our changing planet. Within months of that first trip to Iceland, the photographer conceived the boldest expedition of his life: The Extreme Ice Survey. With a band of young adventurers in tow, Balog began deploying revolutionary time-lapse cameras across the brutal Arctic to capture a multi-year record of the world's changing glaciers.

[...] It takes years for Balog to see the fruits of his labor. His hauntingly beautiful videos compress years into seconds and capture ancient mountains of ice in motion as they disappear at a breathtaking rate. Chasing Ice depicts a photographer trying to deliver evidence and hope to our carbon-powered planet.

As we shared back in March, Balog created his epic time-lapse videos by placing 27 Nikon D200 DSLRs around the world, setting each of them to snap 8,000 photos a year.

Steward Magazine has published a fascinating interview with photographer Anton Kusters, who spent two years documenting a yakuza gang in Tokyo, capturing highly intimate glimpses into what life is like in the criminal underworld. When asked what he felt like when the project was just starting out, Kusters states,

I was extremely nervous. Since they are gangsters, I thought I should be very careful, in case I shot something I wasn’t supposed to see. But this actually upset the gang. They saw my nervousness as disrespectful. I remember one time early on this guy pulled me aside and said, “You are here to take pictures. Act like a professional.” It turned out they respected me if I was really aggressive about getting a certain shot. To not take photos was a sign of weakness.

As his surname suggests, Kusters is not from Japan (he's from Belgium). It took 10 months of negotiations before he and his brother were given an unprecedented access into the closed world of Japanese organized crime.

Men at Lunch is an amazing new documentary film by Seán Ó Cualáin that explores the story of one of the most iconic photographs of the 20th century: Lunch atop a Skyscraper. the 1932 photo of eleven construction workers taking a lunch break while sitting on a girder suspended 850 feet above New York City.

Earlier this month we wrote about a new Keanu Reeves-produced movie titled Side by Side, a documentary about the major shift going on in Hollywood away from film and toward digital. In addition to the interesting subject matter and star studded list of interviewees, here's another thing that makes the movie awesome: PetaPixel makes a cameo.

If you have a free 20 minutes, here's a great 1958 documentary on the life and work of iconic landscape photographer Ansel Adams. Created while Adams was living at a house near the Golden Gate Bridge, the film provides a look into his home, interests, attitudes toward art, camera equipment, and photographic techniques.

The photography industry isn't the only one transitioning away from film and into digital; Hollywood's undergoing the exact same thing. Side by Side is an upcoming documentary film produced by Keanu Reeves that offers a look into this major transition that's underway

For almost one hundred years there was only one way to make a movie — with film. Movies were shot, edited and projected using photochemical film. But over the last two decades a digital process has emerged to challenge photochemical filmmaking.

SIDE BY SIDE, a new documentary produced by Keanu Reeves, takes an in-depth look at this revolution. Through interviews with directors, cinematographers, film students, producers, technologists, editors, and exhibitors, SIDE BY SIDE examines all aspects of filmmaking — from capture to edit, visual effects to color correction, distribution to archive. At this moment when digital and photochemical filmmaking coexist, SIDE BY SIDE explores what has been gained, what is lost, and what the future might bring.

Vivian Maier, Photographer is a beautiful short film about the life and work of …

The photograph you see above isn't the result of Photoshop or infrared photography. Captured by Spanish photographer Palíndromo Mészáros, it shows what the landscape of Ajka, Hungary looked like half a year after the Ajka alumina plant accident -- an industrial disaster in which 35 million cubic feet of toxic waste flooded the land to a height of around 6.5 feet. Mészáros lined up the thick red line caused by the sludge with the horizon line to obtain this surreal image.

Here’s a beautiful short film by Arden Oksanen titled “Pictures of a Cowboy”. It’s about the life and work …

In No Great Hurry – 13 Lessons in Life with Saul Leiter is …

School Portrait is a project by documentary filmmaker and communications student …

Ken Burns is a documentary legend, and even though he comes from a filmmaking perspective, his ideas on what makes a story worth telling (or, in our case, a moment worth capturing) are universal and universally inspiring.