James Hamilton began his career in New York City in the 1970s. He has worked with Harper’s Bazaar, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, The New York Observer and for twenty years was a staff photographer for The Village Voice, the iconic weekly magazine about life in New York.
Hamilton has photographed criminal gangs on Coney Island, punks in Alphabet City, the first feminist demonstrations on Fifth Avenue, and absolutely every cult figure of American culture from Woody Allen and Susan Sontag to Lou Reed and Jim Jarmusch. His fans include Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, who released an album of Hamilton’s best photos through his publishing project, and Wes Anderson, who invited him to document the making of many of his films and also became the producer of this movie. In Uncropped, Hamilton discusses photography and journalism with his colleagues and fans (Moore and Anderson appear, among others), reminisces about his wonderful grandmother, who became a popular actress as a senior, and tells tales about celebrities, such as how he persuaded Jean-Luc Godard to pose on the balcony of a skyscraper even though the filmmaker was afraid of heights. Far from being a conventional biographical documentary, the film is a light and witty New York-style intellectual conversation about everything in the world, which makes perfect sense. Hamilton is the kind of person who is much more interested in the world around him than in his own persona, and that is what makes his famous photos so captivating.
The film will be screened in English with Russian subtitles.
Uncropped
Director: D.W. Young
USA, 2023. 111 min. 18+
