VIFF Review: Uncropped

A young Hamilton taking a picture with Salvador Dali

James Hamilton was studying art at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York and didn't know anything about photography when he became fashion photographer Alberto Rizzo's assistant.

But as Hamilton learned more about photography and got his first camera, he was hooked. He did lots of street photography and applied his knowledge of art in terms of composition to make his pictures. Hamilton was so fussy about his prints that he turned his kitchen into a darkroom and hung the negatives and prints to dry in the bathroom. 

Hitchcock revealing a jovial side of him

That's how he tells it in Uncropped, a fantastic documentary about him, the 40-year span of his career as well as the state of journalism in New York. It's a pretty comprehensive profile about Hamilton, with him willingly telling his story, and gets his friends and ex-colleagues to talk as well; it seems that he has kept his friendships for decades.

While the documentary goes in chronological order, in between the anecdotes are a selection of his shots taken during that time to show the evolution of Hamilton's subjects and photography skills. His reporter colleagues marvelled at his ability to take pictures that encapsulated what they were grappling how to write in their stories. One of those reporters became his wife.

And because he was so experienced, he seemed cool as a cucumber looking for the shot; with celebrities Hamilton would only be given 15 minutes to shoot them and so he worked very fast.

In the earlier years, he reminisced about meeting Alfred Hitchcock and his wife in their hotel room in New York. Hamilton just knocked on their hotel room door and spent the afternoon with them; one of the pictures he took was of Hitchcock sitting in a chair by a desk and laughing -- an image of him that he did not usually present to the media. 

Director Ang Lee with Michelle Yeoh in 2000

While he took pictures of celebrities, he also did photo journalism, about young women who were prostitutes and drug addicts, and also had overseas assignments, covering the war and famine in Ethiopia in the 1980s, and was even in Beijing during the Tiananmen Square massacre in June 1989.

Sitting next to him recalling the story, his reporter friend says Hamilton should have gotten a Pulitzer because they managed to sneak into a mortuary and Hamilton shot pictures of bodies in body bags, and indeed some shots in the film show bloodied faces. Like other photographers there at the time, they snuck the film out through diplomatic channels.

Another aspect of him is his love of movies, and some directors actually had Hamilton in their films as an extra. Sometimes he was just standing there, or he was pretending to be a photographer, like in Wes Anderson's The Tenenbaums. Hamilton was in the films while also shooting the movie stills for the media to use.

Throughout his 40-year career, Hamilton has shot millions of pictures, and while he has them all labelled in see-through storage boxes that are labelled, they are all in a storage unit; some were compiled in a book, but then what?

Jack Nicholson with a newspaper article of him

Uncropped was so inspiring to watch that I went home and found my digital camera and charged up the dead battery and shot pictures again. Street photography isn't easy, but it's all about timing and practice. Today Hamilton wanders around with a small digital camera and randomly takes pictures -- not even looking to see what he's taking because he knows he's got it.

As Hamilton's career ends around 2010 these journalists in their 70s mourn the demise of media, how the number of publications has shrunk as well as how freelancers are offered ridiculous word rates of 10 cents a word, and how people depend on social media for their news and not news outlets.

They were really lucky to be given opportunities to shoot or write pretty much whatever they wanted, which is why they are so passionate about what they do and remember those days so vividly.

Uncropped

Directed by D.W. Young

Starring James Hamilton

111 minutes

2023