“It was arranging chaos in a certain way,” James Hamilton can be heard saying of what taking pictures have allowed him to do over scenes of the photographer wandering around Washington Square Park nearby his apartment in New York in the opening minutes of “Uncropped,” randomly snapping away with no time wasted for composition to capture life as it happens. Whether in his street photography that helped given New York publications such as The Village Voice and the Observer part of their strong feel for the city or the portraiture he’d do of celebrities for fashion magazines, often not having more than a few minutes with them during a full day of press, Hamilton could summon the spirit of what was in front of him without waiting for his eyes to adjust.
In D.W. Young’s zesty profile of Hamilton, life zips by as the photographer can be seen from his earliest days in Texas finagling press credentials to music festivals with dubious assignments that would get him into snap pictures of BB King to shooting set photography for the likes of Wes Anderson and George A. Romero in between his work back in New York as one of the city’s great cultural observers. However, his work has all the more power when Young, following his deeply rewarding dive into New York’s rare book market in “The Booksellers,” allows one to fully absorb how Hamilton seizes the moment as photos are given the expanse of the big screen, perhaps still in presentation but ferociously alive in their detail and now evidence of a time and place that may not exist anymore allowing one to travel back.
As friends and colleagues such as Thurston Moore, David Lee, Mark Jacobson and Sylvia Plachy bat around memories of Hamilton, they also revive an irresistible sense of community that the photographer made it his mission to capture, yielding a collection of frames both of Hamilton’s making and of Young’s that truly get at the soul of his work and the result is both transfixing and enchanting when you understand how comfortable the photographer could make his subjects when he is such wonderful company in walking audiences through his life. After the film made its premiere at DOC NYC last fall, “Uncropped” is coming to theaters this week and Young graciously took the time to talk about how he got his arms around Hamilton’s sprawling body of work, shaking things up formally to give the film as much vitality as you’d expect from one of the photographer’s pictures and why he’s bidding adieu to his hometown as a subject for a bit.
How did this come about?
Our producer Judith Mizrachy was the starting point of the film. We’re married but we often work together and she had worked with James way back when for a couple of years at the New York Observer when she was the photo editor there briefly around 2000. So she knew James, but lost touch over the years and during the pandemic, when everyone was locked in, he went joined Facebook for the first time and started posting a lot of his work that he was digitizing just for friends. She started seeing all these photos from previous eras and facets of his work that she had never seen when she was working with him, and she was pretty blown away by it. Then she started showing me some of them and I also thought they were just amazing. Then the film work [he did] was very exciting to us too and she threw out the idea, “What about a documentary about James?” And what it means to make a photography documentary after so many have been made was a big question, but we met with James and and we talked about some of the initial inklings I had and what the scope of the film could be and he was interested, so we just dipped our toes there and then got into it.
It becomes a stealth history of so many New York publications that he shot pictures for as well and after “The Booksellers,” it seems like you’ve become this cultural historian for New York. Was that part of the appeal as well?
After “The Booksellers,” I really was feeling like I did not want to make another New York City movie. [laughs] At least not for decades. I was really like, “That’s enough New York for me,” but then James is the ultimate historian of New York, so it was irresistible in that respect. The added layer of James being both an entry point into that history, but also embodying the history itself so much was what really made the appeal of making the film something a little bigger than just purely a biography. Although at its core it’s a portrait of James’ work, I think all these people he worked with and that he’s friends with and that whole world they existed in are such a part of his story that it naturally allows for a little bit more, hopefully.
It’s very convivial, in part because you actually bring James into the interviews you do with others. Was that always part of the plan?
I think that’s one of the more distinct things we did, or at least unconventional and it comes from a few different elements. Something I was interested generally in was how to move away from the strict sit-down interview, although I think it gets a bad rap in a lot of respects because it’s associated with talking heads. But a sit down interview does not have to mean someone’s just used as a talking head. It can be a much more extensive, deeper conversation. It just depends how it’s employed. But in “The Booksellers,” there’s a dinner scene at the end where everyone’s having dinner and we shot it with three or four cameras and it’s a much more lively, interactive conversation. I had a really good time doing that, and I’d hoped to use more of it in the film because we had a lot there, but it became one thing too much stylistically to really fit, so I had to lose most of it. But the idea of doing that again was something in the back of my mind in the right scenario.
James doesn’t love being interviewed in a [solo] shot particularly, so I was hoping that he would be more comfortable and we’d get to see more of him and different facets of him in conversation with his colleagues and long time collaborators and let you get at the information in a different way. It would also let the people exist differently in the film and real significant characters in the film, not just merely there to provide sound bites. I also liked that you can cut it in a more narrative way and it creates a different dynamic when you have three cameras [instead of] almost shot/reverse [shot] at times.
When you’re simply presenting the photographs, it also feels quite dynamic and absorbing. How’d you find the right rhythm and format for them?
It’s an impossible challenge on some level because the rhythm of the film that you want to achieve is potentially at odds with the photograph itself, so you know that you’re inevitably not going to be able to give people enough time to see all the photos if you give them a full sense of the breadth of the work. So there’s a compromise there in a lot of ways, but one way to compensate for that is to show some photos longer and talk about them more, so you can go in depth at times, but at other times, you’re getting a lot of stuff faster, and in the composite that’s a victory in another sense.
I also have to thank our art director Matt Eller, whose idea to do a lot more of the insetting and resets showing the photos. We didn’t want to crop the photos, not at least because the film is called “Uncropped,” but I do feel like if you’re seriously presenting a photographer’s work, you want to see the photo as the photo it is. Now, there are exceptions and sometimes you want to zoom in to see a detail, or you’re doing a special visual thing where you’re moving around more, but Matt’s idea of doing more in-setting and showing the photos a little bit at different sizes enabled a little more of a way to create a rhythm and variety visually, but also respect to the photography. Then some photos became more interesting when you could see them a little smaller because it’s like pulling back almost and then some were fuller with a lot of detail, so you could get into the detail better. That was a great idea that he had.
From what I understand, you’re still learning of new photos from his archives. What was it like to lay it all out and organize?
If we needed to lay everything out, we’d need several football fields. [laughs] I never saw everything and to go with everything, we’d never finish the movie. But for starters, James knows a lot of the photos that he feels strongest about showing or the different subjects he’s particularly enthusiastic about, so we looked a lot of those first. And then I would have ones that I liked for different reasons [where] I would see something and it would be more about how it worked in the context of the film or historically, so that [took] a lot of the hunting and pecking. We did look at contact sheets here and there and old prints, but [he had] handled a lot of stuff digitally already and that was great because we were able to sort through that faster.
One thing I was really pleased with was often for his assignments, [the photos that were published were] obviously bound by what’s being written and the focus [of the story], so there are two to four pictures that maybe run with that, but of course James is taking a whole range of photos and some of them might be even better or interesting in a different way, but they didn’t fit what the paper needed at that time. Like the Coney Island gang story, he had these stunning and moving photos of these young gang members in Coney Island, [which was] in this state of disrepair in the ‘70s. It was transitional, so being able to show more of that in conjunction with the story [we were telling] was really cool.
Was there anything that changed your ideas of what this was?
It became very apparent as we went along that we needed to see a certain amount of photography in the context of the publications because so much of the discussion in the film — [the photography that the] film’s looking at and critiquing or historically representing — is about the context of how it was done journalistically and as is discussed in the film, how much that affected a lot of James’ photographic choices, so that became more and more something to think about.
I was curious if David Lee, who didn’t only work at the Voice, but also became an on-set photographer because of his brother Spike, was actually envisioned as much as an interesting parallel to James as he ultimately came off as before talking to him.
Yeah, Sylvia [Plachy] was obviously the number one photographer I wanted to speak with because she and James were the two pillars of the paper and really defined it visually. She’s also an absolutely phenomenal photographer, so she was essential to me and I’m so happy that she did it. But I didn’t want to [have] 20 photographers just talking over and over, but I did feel like I wanted at least one more photographer from The Voice or relevant in some way to James. He’d been talking about David’s work a bit and David liked James’ work and David’s really a much more substantial and important stills photographer than James was — not just for Spike, but for many other big directors, and he wasn’t at the Voice that long, but it was a great window into being at the Voice in a little different way than James and Sylvia, so I thought it was great that he could be there in a few different ways at once.
But most interesting was the idea that he could provide a little contrast to James [technically] because James is a pretty eccentric stills photographer. He doesn’t do it very much in the traditional way and he really worked principally with people who wanted that. Romero wanted that, and Wes wanted more of this behind the scenes documentary, but very specific ideas about what promo he was going to use. So one thing I found very interesting from speaking with David was that he was much more an advocate of the potential of the publicity still and what that can be photographically. David’s just made these beautiful photos that define the movie — I’m thinking of a still from “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” that’s in the film briefly of Kate Winslet’s head is resting on [Jim Carrey], and it really like captures something about the movie. So I liked that they come from a little different schools of thought, but they’re both street photographers in essence, starting out, and it was great that David was able to talk with us.
What’s it been like to engage with audiences now with the film starting to get out into the world?
People have responded really well, and what’s been most interesting to me is when really younger people who are in their early 20s and truly have no sense of the world of the movie personally, respond to it. I think it’s like a real time travel thing for them in a lot of ways, and there’s a lot that they are really fascinated by and tap into things they’re really interested in like how to position themselves in the digital world.
“Uncropped” opens on April 26th in New York at the IFC Center and Sag Harbor at the Sag Harbor Cinemas Arts Center and in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Royal, Philadelphia at the PSF Bourse and Vancouver, Washington at the Kiggins. It will open at the Grand Illusion Cinema in Seattle on May 6th.
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