IDS 101: Understanding Fine Art Photography: Films

Set in Chicago, a beautiful photographer and a sweet-talking poet get together and discover romance.

A London photographer takes some pictures of a couple in a park and discovers that he may have recorded evidence of a murder.

A photographer obsessed with the prostitutes in New Orleans' red-light district in 1917 is bewitched by a twelve-year-old child prostitute.

A Cinderella story about an inconspicuous salesgirl who is whisked off to Paris by a group of fashion magazine sophisticates and transformed into a dazzling model with whom the magazine's photographer falls in love.

Back from the Great War, photographer Charles Castle specializes in exposing fraudulent spiritualists. But when a beautiful woman brings him a picture that offers tantalizing proof of a world of fairies and spirits, Castle is drawn into a web of passion, romance and intrigue.

A lovestruck tintype photographer falls for a pretty girl, an employee of MGM News service. Buying an antiquated movie camera, he sets out to film news events in the streets of New York so he can win a job and the girl's affection.

As a photographer with a broken leg, Stewart takes up the fine art of spying on his Greenwich Village neighbors during a summer heat wave. Things really begin to get hot when he suspects a salesman may have murdered his nagging wife and buried the body in a flower garden.

The true story behind perhaps the most famous moment in American military history -- the raising of the U.S. flag on the Pacific island of Iwo Jima, February 23, 1945 -- and the immortal photograph that lifted the heart and spirit of a nation at war.

Wet dreams and false images: "Exposes the art of digital photo-retouching. How do images of perfect female beauty influence men's perceptions of real women? And, how we see ourselves?"

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.

Edward S. Curtis was a driven, pioneer photographer who set out in 1900 to document traditional Indian life. He became the most famous photographer of his time and created an enormous body of work. This film tells the dramatic story of Curtis' life, his work, and his changing views of the people he set out to document. Native Americans who are using his photographs for cultural preservation respond to the pictures, tell stories about the people in the photographs and discuss the meaning of the images.

Born in Eastern Kentucky, [Shelby Lee] Adams has devoted 30 years of his life to visiting and making portraits of families living in Appalachia, those who have been misrepresented in the media and derogatorily referred to as 'hillbillies' ...

While living in the red light district of Calcutta, documenting life in the brothels, New York-based photographer Zana Briski embarked on a project by which she gave cameras to the children of prostitutes and taught them photography, awakening within them hidden talent and creativity and giving them a means to transform their lives.

The fancy (2000, 36 min.) " ... is a speculative, experimental work based on the life of Francesca Woodman (1958-1981) as evoked in the published catalogues of and about her photographs."

Brazilian crime drama film telling the story of two boys growing up in a violent neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro take different paths: one becomes a photographer, the other a drug dealer.

follows a week in the life of a philandering paparazzo journalist living in Rome. The term "paparazzi" gained popularity after Fellini was inspired to name one of the photographers in his film Paparazzo.

In the 1920s Civil War in Russia, Budenny's revolutionary army gets hold of a French movie camera as a trophy. To receive operational reconnaissance data, the army's general staff decides to use it for filming the enemy fortifications from air. A former photographer, soldier Andrei Nekrasov is assigned to be a cameraman.