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.
Rooftopping photography is a dangerous new fad in which daredevils climb to extremely high (and often off-limits) urban locations in order to shoot vertigo-inducing photographs. Two of the most famous practitioners in the world right now are Vadim Mahorov and Vitaliy Yakhnenko, two young Russian daredevils who have attracted a great deal of attention for their images (they're the same guys who recently snuck to the top of Egypt's Great Pyramid).
If you want to see how the duo works, check out the short 6-minute documentary film above (warning: there's a bit of strong language). It's titled "Roofer's Point of View," and was created by HUB Footwear.
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.