James Hamilton’s legacy snaps into focus in “Uncropped”

D.W. Young’s documentary, which chronicles the legendary photographer and decline of journalism, premieres locally at Arts + Literature Laboratory on November 14.

“We never crop James Hamilton’s photographs.” Renowned art book editor Eva Prinz delivers this line with clear-eyed conviction during a quiet moment in Uncropped, a documentary that purports to be about legendary New York photographer James Hamilton. And it is. But it’s also about journalism, ceaseless commitment, and how Hamilton’s legacy is inseparable from the medium’s evolution.

Directed by D.W. Young and executive produced by Wes Anderson (among several others), Uncropped is a tender and occasionally tangential look at Hamilton’s life. Beautifully shot by Marika Hacking and Francesco Saviano—who had the unenviable task of living up to Hamilton’s eye for composition—Uncropped exudes respect for both Hamilton and photography itself.

The film is neatly segmented into sections that chronicle the years in which Hamilton was working at various publications: Crawdaddy, The Herald (a very short-lived Sunday newspaper in New York), Harper’s Bazaar, The Village Voice, and New York Observer. It also features Hamilton working alongside a few of his favorite filmmakers (including George Romero and Anderson) as a stills photographer. Young’s film covers Hamilton’s body of photographic work in the process, which extends from 1969 to 2008, as well as his present day-to-day. As it traces Hamilton’s oeuvre, Uncropped also—and with a clear sense of justifiable anger—documents the ongoing collapse of creative journalistic freedom.

But the documentary strikes a precarious balance by emulating its subjects’ artistic impulses. (One of the people who gets the most screen time is Hamilton’s photographer colleague at the Voice, Sylvia Plachy, who specialized in a striking impressionism, which Uncropped occasionally mimics.) Subjects drift in and out, at such a rate that they can be difficult to keep straight, but viewers get a very genuine sense of who they are. Multiple people in the doc underline this exact trait as one of the hallmarks of Hamilton’s portraiture work. The photographer himself explains: “I wanted them to be portrayed the way I wanted to see them. I wanted a stranger to know something about them.” Hamilton says this in reference to his shots of a dizzying slew of celebrities, but the same theory can be applied to his street photography of everyday New Yorkers. It also holds true for the photographs of the numerous politicians, criminals, and death row inmates he took over the course of his career.

A consensus agreement emerges throughout Uncropped: Hamilton’s evident (and seemingly innate) technical formality was a boon, but his defining gift lay in documenting the soul of his subjects. Uncropped retains a portion of that quality, but it also extends it out to systemic viewpoints. Given Hamilton’s prominence as a photographer in New York was largely synchronous with his superlative work at The Village Voice, where he worked for nearly two decades (1974 to 1993; a period largely viewed as the ending stretch of the publication’s heyday), it’s not surprising that Uncropped‘s focus dovetails to the Voice.

For a notable portion of the film, Uncropped largely sidelines Hamilton to dive deep on the power dynamics, artistic freedom, scattershot impulses, and near-continuous infighting that defined the Voice during that time period. In doing so, the doc makes a clear argument that Hamilton’s trajectory as a photographer exemplified some defining aspects of that era of journalism.

Hamilton’s run-and-gun style of shooting evoked a sense of freedom that feels lost to time. It’s a trait that is complemented by his unhinged level of commitment (one that becomes especially stark as he recalls his on-the-ground photography work during a military-led assault on civilians at Tiananmen Square, in addition to his time covering a period of war and famine in Ethiopia). A few of the doc’s many talking heads lament the loss of investment in and support for journalism, which means that far fewer people working in media today have the resources they need to do that brand of reporting, whether in written or photographic form.  

The lines that stick out the most in Uncropped all reference the potency of Hamilton’s photography. “Your writing has to be up to James’ photography,” notes one of his former colleagues at the Voice. Towards the end of the film, another of his collaborators puts an even finer point on Hamilton’s indefatigable importance to not just photography, but the spirit of journalism (and, arguably, New York): “The Voice is gone, but James Hamilton is still out there.”

Uncropped is screening free at Arts + Literature Laboratory (ALL) on Thursday, November 14, at 7 p.m.. This special event is a part of the FlakPhoto documentary series, and will also be presented as part of the PhotoMidwest Festival programming that occurs at ALL through December.