movies about photography

Turning her back on her wealthy, established family, Diane Arbus falls in love with Lionel Sweeney, an enigmatic mentor who introduces Arbus to the marginalized people who help her become one of the most revered photographers of the twentieth century.

Artist Henri Cartier-Bresson comments on several of his photographs. One of the last films shot with the photographer, also featuring Robert Delpire, Elliott Erwitt, Isabelle Huppert, Josef Koudelka, Arthur Miller, and Ferdinando Scianna.

To many, Don McCullin is the greatest living war photographer, often cited as an inspiration for today's photojournalists. For the first time, McCullin speaks candidly about his three-decade career covering wars and humanitarian disasters on virtually every continent and the photographs that often defined historic moments. From 1969 to 1984, he was the Sunday Times of London's star photographer, where he covered stories from the civil war in Cyprus to the war in Vietnam, from the man-made famine in Biafra to the plight of the homeless in the London of the swinging sixties. Exploring not only McCullin's life and work, but how the ethos of journalism has changed throughout his career, the film is a commentary on the history of photojournalism told through the lens of one of its most acclaimed photographers.

The meaning of art itself comes into question in this documentary about Shelby Lee Adams' controversial photos of families in Appalachia.

Following photographer Anton Corbijn's global travels and artistic work, revealing the tensions between his private life, career success, artistic ambitions, and personal solitude.

Everybody Street" highlights the lives and work of New York's iconic street photographers and the unparalleled city that has inspired them for decades.

Nicholas Vreeland walked away from a worldly life of privilege to become a Tibetan Buddhist monk. Grandson of legendary Vogue editor, Diana Vreeland, and trained by Irving Penn to become a photographer, Nicholas' life changed drastically upon meeting a Tibetan master, one of the teachers of the Dalai Lama. Soon thereafter, he gave up his glamorous life to live in a monastery in India, where he studied Buddhism for fourteen years. In an ironic twist of fate, Nicholas went back to photography to help his fellow monks rebuild their monastery. Recently, the Dalai Lama appointed Nicholas as Abbot of the monastery, making him the first Westerner in Tibetan Buddhist history, to attain such a highly regarded position.

A documentary on the relationship between curator Sam Wagstaff, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, and musician/poet Patti Smith.

"Bert Stern: Original Mad Man" is the definitive voyage into the life and work of one of America's most influential photographers. Photographing the world's most alluring women in fashion and Hollywood for the past 50 years -- Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor and Audrey Hepburn among them -- minted Stern as a celebrity in his own right.

Alasdair Gray is one of the giants of Scottish Arts, gaining a reputation as a great writer, artist, notorious drunkard, irascible interviewee and controversial essayist. In this intimate portrait, filmed over the course of 15 years, he has allowed himself to be filmed creating work that has become part of the living heritage of Scotland. This feature length documentary gets behind the hype, revealing a character who is by turns incisive, chaotic and laugh out loud funny. There is no one better that Alasdair if you want to understand the cultural drive for independence.

Photographer Spencer Tunick travels the U.S. in search of volunteers to pose nude for his outlaw photo-shoots, all of them done out in public and often without legal permits. This documentray chronicles Tunick's logistic nightmares, his brushes with the law, and the free-spirit-volunteers who discard their inhibitions for his artistic vision, and their own personal concepts of self-gratification

A documentary that exposes the rich growing subculture of hip-hop that was developing in New York City in the late '70s and early '80s, specifically focusing on graffiti art and breakdancing.

A journey inside the world of a legend of modern art and an icon of feminism. Onscreen, the nonagenarian Louise Bourgeois is magnetic, mercurial and emotionally raw-an uncompromising artist whose life and work are imbued with her ongoing obsession with the mysteries of childhood. Her process is on full display in this intimate documentary, which features the artist in her studio and with her installations, shedding light on her intentions and inspirations. Louise Bourgeois has for six decades been at the forefront of successive new developments, but always on her own powerfully inventive and disquieting terms. In 1982, at the age of 71, she became the first woman to be honored with a major retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art. In the decades since, she has created her most powerful and persuasive work, including her series of massive spider structures that have been installed around the world. Filmed with unparalleled access between 1993 and 2007, Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine is a comprehensive and dramatic documentary of creativity and revelation.

Three journalists in a romantic triangle are involved in political intrigue during the last days of the corrupt Somoza regime in Nicaragua before it falls to a popular revolution in 1979.

Two documentary filmmakers chronicle their time in Sonagchi, Calcutta and the relationships they developed with children of prostitutes who work the city's notorious red light district.

This documentary studies the motivations of journalists dedicated enough to risk their lives for a story. We follow narrator Amy Eldon on a personal journey to find meaning in the death of her older brother, 22-year-old Reuters photographer Dan Eldon. Dan was among a group of five journalists attacked by a mob during the Somali famine in 1993; he and three others were stoned to death. As she interviews other journalists and the sole surviving witness to Dan's death, we see her attain the peace she sought.

A drama based on the true-life experiences of four combat photographers capturing the final days of apartheid in South Africa.

Barbara Leibovitz's intimate biography of her sister the photographer Annie Leibovitz.

Fashion photographer Laura Mars, whose photographs contain violent images, develops the ability to see through a killer's eyes. Those around her include her driver Tommy, her manager Donald, her ex-husband Michael, and policeman John.

A camera crew follows Helmut Newton, the fashion and ad photographer whose images of tall, blond, big-breasted women are part of the iconography of twentieth-century erotic fantasy. He's on the go from L.A., to Paris, to Monte-Carlo, to Berlin, where he was a youth until he escaped from the Nazis in 1936. We see him on shoots, interviewing models, and discussing his work. It's not art and it's not good taste, he tells students. We meet June, his Australian-born wife, whom he married in 1948. Three actresses talk about working with Newton and how posing is different from acting. A heart attack in 1973 helps Newton re-focus, resulting in more personal photographic projects.

A fashion photographer unknowingly captures a death on film after following two lovers in a park.

A mentally unstable photo developer targets an upper middle-class family after his obsession with them becomes more sick and disturbing than any of them could imagine.

Some of the most iconic portraits of the 20th and 21st centuries were taken by photographer Richard Avedon. For more than fifty years, Richards portraits have filled the pages of the country's finest magazines.

Hopelessly in love with a woman working at MGM Studios, a clumsy man attempts to become a motion-picture cameraman to be close to the object of his desire.

The wife of a photojournalist sets out to discover why he came home from a recent assignment without his colleague.