DVD
PHOTOGRAPHY TITLES
Here is
a listing of photography DVD titles that might be of value to your library:
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Written,
directed and produced by Ric Burns and timed to celebrate the
100th anniversary of Ansel Adams's birth, Ansel Adams is an elegant,
moving and lyrical portrait of one of the most eloquent and quintessentially
American photographers. At the heart of the film are the themes
that absorbed Adams throughout his career: the beauty and fragility
of "the American earth," the inseparable bond between
man and nature and the moral obligations that the present owes
to the future. Ansel Adams was co-produced by the Sierra Club
and attracted 5 million broadcast viewers upon its initial airing
on PBS.
Release date:
January 2003
DVD Features: Widescreen anamorphic format |
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In 1967, when the Museum of Modern
Art in New York City presented New Documents -- a major exhibition
of the personal visions of several photographers -- the surprise
of the show was the work of Diane Arbus. On her own, against the
advice of many friends, she had pursued her documentation of people
on the fringes of society, and the astonishing in the commonplace.
Suddenly she was famous, with students and imitators. By 1972 her
work was everywhere, and was featured at the Venice Biennale, where
it became, as New York Times critic Hilton Kramer said, the overwhelming
sensation of the American Pavilion. But by then Diane Arbus was
dead, by her own hand. "Nothing about her life, her photographs
or her death was accidental or ordinary," wrote Richard Avedon.
"They were mysterious and decisive and unimaginable except
to her. Which is the way it is with genius." This
half-hour documentary was made that same year. It explores her
work and ideas, often in her own words as spoken by a close friend.
It includes reflections by some of the people who knew her best;
daughter Doon, teacher Lisette Model, colleague Marvin Israel,
and John Szarkowski, at that time the director of the photography
department at the Museum of Modern Art.
Release date: June 2006 |
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Vividly portrayed in this American Masters Special, photographer
Richard Avedon shoots for two different worlds. Primarily, he
is a fashion photographer, having worked for various magazines
for more than 50 years. Of particular note is the description
of photographing Natassja Kinski, a shoot that took two hours
of her lying naked on a cement floor as they tried to coax a snake
up her body. As a fashion photographer, Avedon became known for
his sense of movement and the energy he captured in each image;
he gets exquisite models to leap, move, and flip their hair. His
second, and perhaps lesser-known, body of work is art photography,
including portraits of the famous and the unknown, with a signature
style of photographing his sitters on a white background with
no props. This documentary ably captures the tension between these
two directions in his work by overlaying the positive and negative
viewpoints about his photography in a collage of voiceovers. We
learn how Avedon views his role as a photographer, and that for
him the end result captures "the death of the moment."
Also included are the controversial images of his dying father.
This program aptly depicts this highly creative man exposed through
his work as vulnerable, obsessed, and a perfectionist. This 81-minute-long
program will interest a broad audience, from those interested
in fashion, people of our times, the history of the 20th century,
artists and art historians, and photography in general. --Anne
Barclay Morgan --This text refers to the VHS Tape edition.
Release date:
April 2002 |
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This Limited Edition Boxed Set
features works by Henri Cartier-Bresson plus short films and several
documentaries about the legendary photographer and his work.
Release date: March 2010 |
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Actors:
Edward Burtynsky
Directors: Jennifer Baichwal
Run time: 90 minutes
Release date: May 2007 |
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Amazon.com
Manufactured Landscapes works triple-time as a documentary
portrait, a tone poem, and a work of protest. The title comes from
Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky's 2003 book of the same name.
His large-scale images depict the ways industrialization has transformed
the environment. Locations include quarries, slag heaps, and dumping
grounds. Director Jennifer Baichwal (The True Meaning of Pictures:
Shelby Lee Adams' Appalachia) introduces photographs focusing on
China and Bangladesh, and then presents Burtynsky in the process
of creating them. He adds a few words here and there, but Baichwal
mostly lets the people behind his prints--and the devastation that
surrounds them--do the talking. Of the sites they visit, China's
monumental Three Gorges Dam is the most impressive... and depressing.
At the same time the construction has created much-needed jobs,
the world's largest engineering project has also displaced 13 cities
of over 1.3 million people. To paraphrase Burtynsky, Baichwal's
film "searches for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion."
With its ominous soundtrack and stately pace--cinematographer Peter
Mettler's opening pan through a vast manufacturing plant lasts eight
minutes--Manufactured Landscapes is about as far from conventional
as a non-fiction film can get. Like Koyanisqaatsi, Rivers and Tides,
and Darwin's Nightmare, Baichwal leaves the charts and graphs behind
to make one irrefutable point: We're in trouble. Extra features,
like deleted scenes (with commentary by Baichwal) and an extensive
slide gallery (with commentary by Burtynsky) add welcome context.
--Kathleen C. Fennessy
Product Description
In the spirit of such environmentally enlightening hits as AN
INCONVENIENT TRUTH and RIVERS AND TIDES, MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES
powerfully shifts our consciousness about the world and the way
we live in it.
The film follows Internationally acclaimed photographer Edward
Burtynsky whose large-scale photographs of manufactured landscapes
quarries, recycling yards, factories, mines and dams create stunningly
beautiful art from civilization s materials and debris. The film
follows him through China, as he shoots the evidence and effects
of that country s massive industrial revolution. Burtynsky s photographs
allow us to meditate on our impact on the planet and witness both
the epicenters of industrial endeavor and the dumping grounds
of its waste.
Release date: November 2007
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Conceived
as an introspective journey that takes you from the first daguerreotypes
to war photojournalism, from fashion spreads to the greatest contemporary
artists, The Adventure of Photography: 150 Years of the Photographic
Image includes 1700 pictures and 300 artists, and will appeal
to all photographers--amateur and professional alike. This is
not only the history of an amazing art form, it is also the adventure
of one century and half during which photography has captured
the image of the collective conscience. This trip is as dazzling
as it is moving, where one crosses paths with such celebrated
photographers as Ansel Adams, Brassai, Lewis Carroll, Robert Doisneau,
George Eastman-Kodak, Max Ernst, Roger Fenton, Eadweard Muybridge,
Helmut Newton, Nicephore Niepce, Man Ray, Edward J. Steichen,
Alfred Stieglitz, Andy Warhol and many more.
Release date:
April 2003
DVD Features: 2 discs |
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Celebrated photographer Tierney Gearon’s
work has been labeled manipulative, disturbing and even perverse.
A former model and dancer, Gearon came to notorious fame in 2001
when photos of her own naked and masked children in the “I
Am a Camera” show at London’s Saatchi Gallery had authorities
threatening child pornography charges. Filmmakers
Peter Sutherland (Pedal) and Jack Youngelson (Producer, Ghosts
of Abu Ghraib) follow this exceptional artist over the course
of two years as she assembles her most daring and emotionally
complex body of work to date: a series on her manic-depressive
schizophrenic mother, who resides in Grey Gardens squalor in the
frozen suburbs of upstate New York. The mixture of art and family
can almost be too close for comfort, but like much of Gearon’s
photographs there is a subversive beauty that emerges from the
incongruity between ordinary moments and madness. Tierney Gearon:
The Mother Project is a moving and intricate portrait of an artist,
her inspirations and unconventional family relationships.
Release date: September 2007 |
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Masters of Photography, Andre Kertesz
The father of 35 millimeter photography was born Andre Kertesz in
Hungary in 1894. He made his reputation in the Paris of the 20s
and 30s before emigrating to the United States. He was a constant
experimenter. Cartier-Bresson once said of him: "Whatever we
have done, Kertész did first." He died in New York City
in 1985. This film was made in 1978. Ranging
over much of his work, this half-hour documentary presents Kertesz
in his own words, explaining many of his pictures and sharing
his memories -- provincial life in Hungary, central Europe in
the First World War, Paris in the glorious "time between
the wars", and famous friends like Colette, Eisenstein, Chagall
and Mondrian. Kertesz takes us through his archive and out into
the streets of New York City to watch him shoot in his beloved
Washington Square and in the medieval environment of The Cloisters.
"I was born for photography," he said. "I changed
everything in my life for it. You only have one life. No hurry
for me... I have the time. Everything is photograph."
Release date: June 2006 |
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Amazon.com
Produced in 1993, this documentary depicts the development of
Annie Leibovitz's career as a celebrity photographer, which she
began after studying painting at the San Francisco Art Institute.
Giving up a position as staff photographer at Rolling Stone magazine,
she went on tour with Mick Jagger, and the photographs of this
period reveal the anguish and torment of being a famous musician.
This documentary also emphasizes the artistic and metaphorical
nature of her portraits: a naked John Lennon embraces Yoko Ono
dressed in black just hours before he was murdered; Clint Eastwood
stands, but is bound up by a rope; Whoopee Goldberg is captured
in a bathtub with legs, arms, and laughing face protruding out
of soapy water. At times the photographer's inspiration comes
from the person she is portraying, such as when Keith Haring paints
a room and then paints his nude body to match the room. We see
footage of how she pursues a shot for the cover of Vanity Fair,
setting up her equipment in various locations to take provocative
photographs of Demi Moore. A naked Demi Moore is painted with
a blue suit, while Leibovitz anxiously waits to take the photographs.
Produced for London Weekend Television, this 51-minute-long program
contains nudity and explicit language, and also talks about the
photographer's drug addiction. Nevertheless, through this gifted
photographer's vision we get a sweeping view of the 1970s and
'80s in the celebrity worlds of music, acting, and politics. --Anne
Barclay Morgan --This text refers to the VHS Tape edition.
Release date:
August 2001 |
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“One of the most exquisitely
intimate portraits not only of an artist’s process, but also
of a marriage and a life.”
- The New York Times
As one of the world’s preeminent photographers, Sally Mann
creates artwork that challenges viewers’ values and moral
attitudes. Described by Time magazine as “America’s
greatest photographer,” she first came to international
prominence in 1992 with Immediate Family, a series of complex
and enigmatic pictures of her three children. What Remains-Mann’s
recent series on the myriad aspects of death and decay-is the
subject of this eponymously titled documentary.
Filmed at her Virginia farm, Mann is surrounded
by her husband and now-grown children, and her willingness to
reveal her artistic process allows the viewer to gain exclusive
entrance to her world. Never one to compromise, she reflects on
her own personal feelings about mortality as she continues to
examine the boundaries of contemporary art. Spanning five years,
What Remains contains unbridled access to the many stages of Mann’s
work, and is a rare glimpse of an eloquent and brilliant artist.
Release date: April 2008 |
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Walter Pfeiffer began practicing photography
in the 1970s with no technical ambition, but with the will to provide
a new visual vocabulary for beauty, eroticism and freedom of spirit.
His work gained its initial recognition through an underground network
of admirers, and today it has achieved cult status. (In a 2003 Artforum
review, Bob Nickas wrote: 'Imagine an optical device designed to
project-and then to trace-a virtual image of desire onto the plane
surface of everyday life. That would be Walter Pfeiffer's libidinal
camera lucida. Since the late 6os Pfeiffer has sought (and caught)
images of youth and beauty as if on an endless quest, the avocation
of entwined hedonism and reportage its own reward. And ours.') Over
the time that Pfeiffer spent exploring the sexualization of the
everyday in that work, he also directed several videos showing his
friends hanging out in his Zurich studio. For the very first time,
these rare and funny scenes, Music for Millions (1977) Kawasaki
Cut (1985) and The Plaza (1985-2001) have here been compiled on
DVD. Their release provides the occasion to reassess Pfeiffer's
pioneering positions both in contemporary art and in the culture
at large.
Release date: August 2006 |
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Amazon.com
As part of the PBS American Masters series, Man Ray:
Prophet of the Avant-Garde covers the life and artwork of
this innovative modern artist with both clips of interviews and
archival footage of the times he lived in. Born in Brooklyn as
Emanuel Radnitsky, he grew discouraged by the New York art world
of the early 1900s, changed his name to Man Ray, and moved to
Paris. He was embraced by the Dadaists, many of whom later became
Surrealists. Although painting was his main love, he took up photography,
making portraits of famous people such as Ernest Hemingway, James
Joyce, and Henri Matisse. He developed a new technique, the rayograph,
in which he placed objects directly onto paper and exposed them
to light. He even made an avant-garde film with this technique.
Whether creating Dada sculptures, such as his famous iron with
a row of tacks enigmatically entitled Le Cadeau, The Gift, innovative
photographs, films, or sculptures, Man Ray always managed to surprise.
In order to earn a living, he turned fashion photography into
art. After living in California and New York during World War
II, he returned to live and work in Paris after the war. Included
in this program are wonderful shots of his Paris studio and home.
Just under an hour long, this program presents a good look at
a remarkable artist. The DVD format also includes an essay by
Neil Baldwin, his biographer and author of the script, which underlines
the influence of the women in his life. The crispness of the images
and the intelligent insights into the ideas of the avant-garde
make viewing a great pleasure. --Anne Barclay Morgan
Release Date:
December 1999
DVD Features:
1) Recovered archival materials include candid film footage personally
shot by Man Ray
2) A never-before-seen video interview unearthed in the vaults
of a Rotterdam museum
3) Long lost drawings from his student days that have not been
seen since 1908
4) Essay by biographer Neil Baldwin: Man Ray and the Women
He Loved
5) Weblinks
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The
Photographers includes a behind-the-scenes look into the lives
of National Geographic photographers and how they get the shot
presented in a compelling one-hour program; plus the bonus half-hour
film on wildlife filmmakers Dereck and Beverly Joubert entitled
A Passion for Africa; an assortment of photographs in
the Photo Gallery; biographies and photos of the photographers;
an interactive trivia quiz; and trailers of other related National
Geographic programs.
Release Date:
May 2003
DVD Features:
1) Bonus Program: A Passion for Africa
2) Photo Gallery
3) Previews of Additional National Geographic Programs
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Helmut
Newton is one of the 20th century's leading photographers, both
outraging and fascinating the public with his startling, groundbreaking
images. He built his reputation with French Vogue with his starkly
luminous photos and then went on to stun the fashion world with
his bold, erotically charged portraits of naked women. In this
intimate look at the artist, we see how Newton changed the field
of photography and get a close-up look at the artist's life and
work, including insights from portrait subjects Catherine Deneuve,
Charlotte Rampling, Sigourney Weaver and Karl Lagerfeld.
Release date:
March 2002 |
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The war
in the South Pacific, a country doctor in Colorado, victims
of industrial pollution in a Japanese village--all were captured
in unforgettable photographs by the legendary W. Eugene Smith.
This program showcases over 600 of Smith's stunning photographs
and includes a dramatic recreation in which actor Peter Riegert
(Crossing Delancey, Local Hero) portrays the artist using dialogue
taken from Smith's diaries and letters. Interwoven through the
program are archival footage and interviews with family and
friends of this brilliant, complicated man, whose work developed
from twin themes of common humanity and social responsibility.
Release
date: February 2002
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From
the Back Cover
Stieglitz, who is revered as one of the most innovative photographers
of the 20th century, played a primary role in fostering new talent.
Through his three galleries in New York City, he mentored emerging
artists such as Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Ansel Adams, Eliot
Porter and Georgia O'Keeffe; and introduced avant-garde Europeans
such as Henri Matisse, Paul Cezanne, Auguste Rodin and Pablo Picasso.
American Masters examines the achievements and legacy of this influential
artist with Alfred Stieglitz - The Eloquent Eye. This revealing
look at "The Father of Modern Photography" features a
rare interview with Georgia O'Keeffe, Stieglitz's wife and muse,
as well as archival footage of other artistic giants he inspired,
including Edward Steichen and John Marin. Additionally, the film
presents countless images from the Stieglitz archives, ranging from
early European peasant life to later views of New York's urban landscape.
Description
American Masters® presents a revealing look at "The Father
of Modern Photography" Alfred Stieglitz, a creative genius
who challenged and revolutionized attitudes toward modern art
in the U.S. while championing the recognition of photography as
an art form.
Release date:
July 2001
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Starring:
James Nachtwey (photojournalist)
Release
date: November 2003
Format: Widescreen
Cast
List
James Nachtwey ... Photographer
Christiane Amanpour ... Chief International Correspondent
CNN
Hans-Hermann Klare ... Foreign Editor STERN Magazine
Christiane Breustedt ... Editor in Chief GEO SAISON Magazine
Des Wright ... Cameraman REUTERS
Denis O'Neill ... Screenwriter/Jim's Best Friend |
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Subjects:
Ansel Adams
Diane Arbus
Richard Avedon
Henri
Cartier-Bresson
Edward Burtysnky
History
Tierney
Gearon
Annie Leibovitz
Andre Kertesz
Sally Mann
Walter Pfeiffer
Man Ray
National Geographic
Helmut Newton
W.Eugene Smith
Alfred Stieglitz
"War Photographer"
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