Photographer: Point, Shoot, Obsess
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B+
Want to take great photographs? Be absolutely obsessed. That’s the message of the six-part National Geographic series Photographer, which debuts this week on National Geographic, Disney+, and Hulu.
Muhammed Muheisen: Finding the Light
The series has no hot tips to offer regarding shutter speed, white balance, and composition. Rather, this series from Free Solo filmmakers Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin is about the biographies of photographers, connecting their personal experiences to the emotionally charged images they capture and create.
Each episode follows a formula. A photographer, or team, pursues one specific passion project. Around that story, the film digresses to explore their personal history, focusing on issues of mental health, family, advocacy, and aesthetic goals.
The opening episode, “Paul Nicklen and Cristina Mittermeier: Win or Die” follows the Canadian photographer Nicklen and his Mexican-born wife, marine biologist and photographer Mittermeier, as they head to the Bahamas to photograph a massive oil rig, and the sea around it.
Their goal, though they don’t admit as much to the managers of the operation, is to shut such projects down. The couple, with their complementary skills — he’s good with animals and isolation; she’s good with people — are social influencers and conservationists who use their photographs and their environmental protection agency SeaLegacy to promote the protection of wildlife and undersea environments.
In “Anand Varma: Hidden Wonders,” the Indian-born American photographer specializes in science-focused miniature and time-lapse images in his custom-built Wonderlab, a combination studio and engineering and teaching laboratory.
The central project here is for a proposed exhibition showing the development of a baby chick, from a blood spot on an egg yolk to a visible heartbeat to a fluffy baby bird, shot through a glass window glued to a hole in an eggshell. Along the way, we see some of his other projects, documenting everything from parasites, bees, jellyfish, and hummingbirds with a weird beauty that puts fashion models to shame.
“Dan Winters: Life Is Once Forever” takes its title from French pioneer Henri Cartier-Bresson and his concept of the “decisive moment.” Winter is most famous for his stylized celebrity portraits (Angelina Jolie, Laura Dern) as well as photojournalism and scientific photography (NASA’s Artemis project) and photojournalism.
The mission in this episode is his desire to photograph a shipyard in Bangladesh, tied to his lifelong obsession with vehicles of all kinds. The Winters episode focuses on his bipolar disorder, how it affects his work, the central role of his wife and manager Kathryn, and his relationship with his adult son Dylan, who is the subject of one of his father’s longest ongoing photography projects.
“Campbell Addy: Feeling Seen” is about the Ghanian-British fashion photographer Addy and his importance in changing Black representation in the fashion world, including images of Beyoncé and Naomi Campbell among others. In this episode, the personal project is his first one-man show called “I Love Campbell” with the word “love” replaced by a red heart, in imitation of the “I Love New York” logo.
The eclectic show, which included photographs based on Bible stories and a short film about love, chronicled the artist’s journey to self-acceptance as a queer, Black youth from a religious immigrant family. It was a blockbuster show last year at London’s 180 Studios.
The psychological backdrop to Australian photographer Krystle Wright’s “Heart Explosions” is less direct, though it’s suggested that her commitment to high-risk, adrenaline-charged moments (extreme sports and storm chasing) is related to her abusive father’s dismissal of her importance.
The episode focuses on a new post-pandemic phase of Wright’s career after a health crisis, where she demonstrates the difference between “taking” and “making” photography, and a sensational series of images involving a mountain climber at night in Utah, and a crevice lit with LED tape. Her inspiration for the intense use of light and shade was the late 16th and early 17th-century painter, Caravaggio.
The final episode, “Muhammed Muheisen: Finding the Light,” follows the Jerusalem-born Pulitzer Prize-winning former Associated Press photojournalist, who shot conflict zones around the world before transforming from reporter to advocate, focusing on the plight of refugees, especially children.
The episode focuses on his most recent mission of documenting Ukrainian refugee families at the Ukrainian-Romanian border while the broader story follows his personal journey, from a child born in a conflict zone, to prize-winning reporter and founder of the Everyday Refugees Foundation, raising awareness through social media, soliciting donations, and maintaining relationships with the subjects of his photographs.
Photographer. Directed by Pagan Harleman, Rita Baghdadi, Kristi Jacobson, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, Crystal Kayiza, Marshall Curry, Samuel D. Pollard and Jimmy Chi. The first two episodes are now available on National Geographic streaming channel, followed by release on Disney+ and Hulu (United States) on March 19. Additional episodes will be released on March 25 and again on April 1.