James Hamilton is an iconic chronicler of New York City culture, a photographer who, throughout his career, has captured the likes of Charles Mingus, Patti Smith, Lou Reed, David Lynch, Jean-Luc Godard, Meryl Streep, Alfred Hitchcock, Liza Minnelli, and Wes Anderson. Now, he gets the documentary treatment in the film “Uncropped,” directed by D.W. Young and executive-produced by Wes Anderson himself. IndieWire shares the exclusive trailer below.
“Uncropped” also turns its focus on the heyday of alternative print journalism (you know, that dinosaur of a thing in the form of alt-weeklies) in New York. Hamilton was best known for his photographs of the art and music scene in NYC throughout the ’70s and ’80s while working as a staffer at Crawdaddy, The New York Herald, Harper’s Bazaar, The Village Voice, and the New York Observer. The film also tracks his career and life beginning in his early days at Pratt in Brooklyn, then an apprenticeship where he learned how to shoot, and his two decades at The Village Voice.
Several set visits throughout his career landed Hamilton Hollywood side gigs (he appeals on screen in Miloš Forman’s “Taking Off”), including as a unit photographer for George Romero (“Knightriders,” “Creepshow”) and Wes Anderson (“The Royal Tenenbaums,” “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou,” and “Darjeeling Limited”). Hamilton shot the instantly iconic photo of Kurt Russell standing under the Statue of Liberty for “Escape from New York.”
As IndieWire previously wrote, “While James Hamilton’s wildly eclectic work has taken him far beyond the Big Apple (good luck finding anyone else whose portfolio includes snaps from both Tiananmen Square and the set of George Romero’s ‘Creepshow’), ‘Uncropped’ focuses on Hamilton’s singular contributions to the local music scene, and shines a new light on the stories behind many of the portraits included in his 2010 monograph ‘You Should Have Heard Just What I Seen.’ This film may not have any interest in reinventing the biodoc, but if you want to hear everyone from Wes Anderson to Thurston Moore reflecting on the contrasts that make New York look and sound like no other city on Earth, you can’t do much better than ‘Uncropped.’”
Greenwich Entertainment releases “Uncropped” in New York on April 26, with a digital launch on May 7. Watch the trailer below.
