You have to see this movie about war photographers called “The Bang Bang Club.”  For photographers, it’s a near perfect experience.

The way photographers are shown in films follows the way in which any profession tends to be depicted in fiction - - usually as a caricature in a single dimension useful to the dramatic license taken out by the filmmaker.

The classic 1960 Federico Fellini movie “La Dolce Vita” introduced the paparazzi to the world stage and forever established a benchmark to the public’s perception of this type of news photographer as essentially a point and shoot automoton in the service of publicists.  That view stuck no matter how brilliantly Weegee worked in this idiom with his sardonic exposures.

Here are Fellini’s paparazzi:

Here is a Weegee photograph:

The 1966 movie “Blow Up” set expectations that all fashion photographers were unbelievably hip, sexy and desirable to their models and to their clients all of whom they could bed and, if desired, at the same time. Here is the quintessential fashion photographer created by Michelangelo Antonioni for the film and played by David Hemmings (the model is Verushka, one of the very first IRL super models):

In Blow Up, a photographer thinks he may have inadvertently captured a crime-in-progress in the background of a picture taken in a park.  You get to see his studio and darkroom but they are just context; not story.

Oliver Stone’s 1986 film “Salvador” made news photographers out to be protagonists or unwitting victims in the stories they were supposed to be covering as journalists.  The photographs of urban revolution taken by an American photographer get transferred to a French free agent who in turn uses them on behalf of the oppressive military dictatorship to persecute, track and assassinate the revolutionaries.

None of these movies actually base their story on the process of making photographs except as a secondary or even more distant aspect of giving a character a job to do.

So it was an extraordinary pleasure to come across “The Bang Bang Club.” It is not a perfect movie by any stretch, but it is a wonderful film about photography and about photographers. The film is a dramatized version of the real-life story of a group of war photographers working together in South Africa between 1990 and 1994 at a time when there was open warfare in the streets. 

Two of the photographers in the group will earn separate Pulitzer Prizes for their work - - the highest peer-voted achievement for any news photographer. This is remarkable in itself but all the more so because the “Club” had only four members.  I will offer no more spoilers.

The film has actual dialogue and scenes about the method of photography, about the technique of shooting in a fire zone, about the selection of framing and subject and, at a nerd level, a bit about the selection of “f” stops on a manual lens in an important exchange concerning professionalism   - - this is a pre-digital world in 1993.  For general viewing audiences there is plenty of material about the sacrifice of the job, the moral dilemma in the observation of violence and atrocity, and the ability to love and live and drink and do drugs in the midst of a pressure cooker world.

But there is also plenty of banter about the process of being a photographer, how editors select your work, how work gets syndicated to other publications and how photographers are understood or misunderstood by others in the media.  It is a fabulous photography-centric window to that world at that time and in that place - - even if romanticized for the movies and dramatized for its story.

Find this movie, “The Bang Bang Club,” and watch it if you love street photography, news photography or just plain old any photography.  It will be an act of respect that you will not likely ever regret even if, in a few spots, you might groan a little. 

I am a bit sorry to come so late to this film released in 2011.  It certainly did not get great exposure here in Los Angeles. It is a joint Canadian/South African production and was directed by a documentarian, Steven Silver.

If you decide to dig deeper into the life and world of conflict journalism, you may want to start at this website for the Dart Center run through the Columbia School of Journalism in the United States: [link]