Reading List
Errol Morris
Documentary Filmmaker and Writer
Errol Morris is an American documentary filmmaker and writer whose films interrogate how people construct and defend their own accounts of events.
He began with Gates of Heaven (1978) and Vernon, Florida (1981), and made The Thin Blue Line (1988), whose reconstructions and interviews reopened a Texas murder case. The Fog of War (2003), built around a long interview with Robert S. McNamara, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Later films include Standard Operating Procedure (2008), The Unknown Known (2013) and American Dharma (2018).
He devised the Interrotron, an interview rig that lets a subject look directly into the lens, and writes on photography and evidence in books including Believing Is Seeing (2011).
The Auschwitz Album
A Book Based Upon an Album Discovered by a Concentration Camp Survivor, Lili Meier
by Peter Hellman
“She found pictures of herself, her relatives and others from the village where they had lived, who were all dead. In 1944 they were liquidating – it’s a horrific word – they were murdering the Hungarian Jews, and here you have an album of close to 200 photographs that were taken by SS men who were on the platform that day in Birkenau [an Auschwitz sub-camp], documenting the selection of Jews for the gas chamber.” — via Interview, September 2011
Lee Miller’s War
by Antony Penrose and David E. Scherman
“In many ways they enhance each other. Photographs are in part about dreams – the dreams that we have about them, the ideas that we associate with them. But they’re also about connecting with reality, about being brought back into the world. They’re a window into the past, and to me this is powerfully evoked in that day or two of photographs created by Scherman and Miller. She was a great writer too.” — via Interview, September 2011
A Day with Picasso
Twenty-Four Photographs by Jean Cocteau
by Billy Klüver
“We knew very little about these photographs – the circumstances, how many there were, who took them, you name it – until Billy Klüver set for himself this project of trying to figure it all out. He did a forensic investigation of the photographs and discovered that they were taken by Jean Cocteau of his friends Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani et cetera. It’s a true detective story about photography.” — via Interview, September 2011
The Perfect Medium
Photography and the Occult
by Clément Chéroux
“In The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult, photos of ghostly apparitions seem to float in the background of posed portraits. A fairy flies before the eyes of an Edwardian adolescent. It’s a reminder that photography was used for theatrical purposes from its earliest history.” — via Interview, September 2011
Gettysburg
A Journey in Time
by William A. Frassanito
“Frassanito was obsessed with Gettysburg and with reconnecting photographs of the Civil War to the circumstances under which they were taken. Through this obsessive quest, he reconnects the photographs to actual geographic places and reorders them to reflect the real sequence of events. It’s a deeply fascinating enterprise and I was inspired by his work.” — via Interview, September 2011