Lartigue

“In 1962 Jacques Henri Lartigue, was travelling across America by Greyhound bus with his wife, Florette. With him he carried two albums of photographs that Florette had been repairing, to while-away the journey. In a chance encounter with a photographic agent at the end of the trip, these family snaps he’d taken as a child were uncovered. For Lartigue, this changed everything. Within a year he had his first solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It captivated the world, and he was hailed a genius of 20th Century photography.”

J.H. Lartigue: The Boy Who Never Grew Up: documentary video.

Helmut Newton by June

“This film is about my husband, Helmut Newton. A few years ago I offered Helmut a video camera for Christmas. But he refused it. So I started using it myself. I looked through the lens and I knew exactly what I was going to do with it: film Helmut at work. This film represents extracts of certain assignments he worked on during this time.” – June Newton (writer and director of “Helmut by June”)

Diane Arbus

A half-hour documentary on Diane Arbus, posted on YouTube in four parts. Made in 1972 after her death that year.

“Diane Arbus was my mother. [...] In July 1971 my mother committed suicide and shortly after that Marvin Israel, a very close friend of hers, and I felt that we wanted to do a book of her work together. So we began collecting not just the pictures but whatever material we could find. In 1970 she had given a class in Westbeth, which was where she lived. And we found out that one of the students in that class was a Japanese photographer named Nikko Nakahara who admired Diane’s work enormously. The problem was that he barely spoke any English at all, so what he had done was to go to the classes and bring along a tape recorder to record everything that was said so that afterwards he could go home and see if he could try and understand it. So he leant us those tapes. The tapes were of very poor quality, so we asked Mary Claire Costello, who was a friend of Diane’s, to read Diane’s words over glimpses of her photographs.” –Doon Arbus

Annie Liebovitz

Annie Liebovitz profile: YouTube video in six parts

Ansel Adams

A half-hour TV interview profiling fine-art photographer and printer, Ansel Adams. YouTube video in four parts.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Henri Cartier-Bresson: the impassioned eye

A documentary about Henri Cartier-Bresson.