I don’t actually watch a ton of TV but I love movies.  Netflix knows how much I love documentaries on art and photography and is great at recommending them to me.  Watching documentaries on photographers helps keep me inspired and I learn very interesting and unique things about photographers and photography that I simply couldn’t learn otherwise.  Just as reading a book or taking a workshop can help you become a better photographer by engaging different aspects of your learning space, watching “docs on togs” can teach you things you couldn’t learn from reading a blog post or picking up a photo magazine.

I recently watched the documentary Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman and found it highly inspirational (<— That’s a recommendation BTW) on so many levels. Like any good documentary it really made me want to learn more about Julius Shulman AND it made me want to watch even more photography centric documentaries.

I wondered: How many of my photographer contacts/followers/readers watch documentaries on photography or documentaries on photographers and which ones do they watch or recommend?

So I asked on my Twitter account, the YPT Twitter account, and our facebook page and got some really great recommendations on docs I had either missed or needed to push up higher in my Netflix queue.  This was a totally selfish task but I thought I’d share some of the responses from all of you awesome people who responded.

Documentaries on Photography

By far the most recommended documentary on photography was War Photographer.

@fotofah – War Photography on James Nachtwey is excellent.

@HeberC – Haven’t seen many. But I thoroughly enjoyed War Photographer.

And there were plenty of other photographers on facebook and Twitter who mentioned War Photographer.  Sadly, I still haven’t seen it.  But it quickly made it’s way to the top of my Netflix queue.

Here are the other photography documentaries mentioned.

@RhondaTipton – Strangely enough, I watched two today. “Smash His Camera” and “Rock Prophecies“. Both were very interesting.

@agdemesa – The Grandaddy of all photo documentaries. BBC’s The Genius of Photography

@panelomo – any of William Eggleston’s

@GKie – The Impassioned Eye was good (Cartier-Bresson)

@kurakensama – War Photographer and La Ciudad de los Fotógrafos (Photographers City), a chilean documental about Photographers under Pinochet

@amairphoto – there was a documentary on Karl Lagerfield, Chanels designer. It focussed on his photography and was really interesting.

I’m not really comfortable linking to facebook profiles so here is a taste of what we got from our facebook fan page.

PhotoXplorers (a documentary style web series)

Fotografia Italiana: 5 Film 5 Grandi fotografi (Italian Photography: 5 Films 5 Big Photographers)

Frames from the Edge: Helmut Newton (ArtHaus – Art and Design Series)

Pretty awesome list if you ask me.

Now it’s your turn to add to this list.  Use the comments section below to show some of your favorite photography documentaries we may have missed.