Movies can be a fertile ground of inspiration for photographers looking to improve and find meaning in their craft. Since cameras are used in photography and cinema, they share technical aspects in image-making such as lighting, composition, exposure, and post-processing. As visual tools used to portray reality, fiction, or a mix of both, photos and films are also used to reflect on concepts surrounding history, memory, identity, humanity, and more. In this list, various filmmakers from Europe, Asia, and the United States offer visual inspiration and introspective views on the art of making pictures.

1. For Contemplating Memories Through Photography: Sans Soleil 

Chris Marker’s 1983  experimental docu-film Sans Soleil is an audiovisual diary of an unnamed narrator who has traveled to Japan, Guinea-Bissau, Iceland, San Francisco, and Cape Verde. As the vignettes of these locations unfold, the narrator ponders on memory and history in a poetic and personal manner. Most people take photos to capture memories for posterity or, in the words of Roland Barthes, to capture that-has-been. From the memorable to the mundane, a moment can be immortalized by a camera. Those who enjoy documenting their travels will get inspiration from how the film captured the locations and its locals and how individual experiences connect to the larger history.

2. Capturing Cityscapes: News From Home 

Solitude permeates Chantal Ackerman’s 1977 documentary film as she reads her mother’s letters against the backdrop of New York City. Her mother’s correspondences are almost consistent, at times reaching a point of overwhelming concern.

Through long takes, timing, and color grading, Ackerman paints the city with a more somber patina. New York’s intrinsically frenetic energy still peeks through, but in Ackerman’s eyes, the city feels slightly different and more personal.

Photographers will appreciate how a place can be depicted as a character and a metaphor for a relationship. The long takes are also delightful to watch; they allow time to observe minute changes in the urban geography. See how everything slowly breathes in this film: the pacing, the city, the words, the loneliness.

3. Defining Beauty: Claire’s Camera

The camera in the title is an easy appeal to photographers who will learn so much from Hong Sang-soo’s 2017 film. In this story, the titular Claire and her metal blue polaroid unspool a web of relationships between the three South Koreans (Man-hee, Director So, and Yang-hye) she met during her sojourn at Cannes. Her photos are used not only as a conversation topic but also as a supplemental language that connects the non-native English main characters.

Aside from taking pictures, Claire’s Camera has an underlying theme of recognizing beauty. From offhanded comments to in-depth discussions, characters often express how beautiful something is; for instance, the sleeping dog on the pavement, a quote from a book, Man-hee’s singing voice, Yang-hye in her youth, cut pieces of pink clothing, and more.

4. On Experimenting: Emak-Bakia 

Man Ray’s 1926 cinépoéme (cinematic poetry) experiments with visual storytelling in many ways. Images made in the artist’s photographic style like Rayographs and double exposure, complement the film’s dream-like narrative structure. Rayograph was Man Ray’s word for photogram, an image developed without a camera, by using photosensitive material and light. In Emak Bakia: Reconsidered, Edward A. Aiken posits that the film reflects the artist’s “private view of photography, the cinema, and painting.” Furthermore, he writes:

Man Ray also probes the relationship between abstraction and realism through his manipulation of light, motion, and focus. In addition, he poses the questions of how chance relates to calculation and how words and images relate to meaning in poetry and art.

5. Revisiting Old Photographs: A Month of Single Frames

Eight years after a one-month residency in an off-grid shack, Barbara Hammer received her cancer diagnosis. A decade after the news, she started to look back at her personal archive as part of her art of dying. That year, in 2018, she entrusted the outputs from her residency to her filmmaker friend Lynne Sachs. A year later, the short film was released, and Hammer finally embraced eternal rest. As Hammer narrated her meditations about life, idyllic shots unfurled in this peaceful farewell: deep purple skies during sunset, long blades of grass dancing with the wind, and gentle rainfall outside the cabin window. This bittersweet tribute is a reminder that there are things that can only be discovered and realized in hindsight.

6. Visualizing the World and Humanity: Koyaanisqatsi 

Godfrey Reggio’s 1982 experimental docu-film is an audiovisual feast. The grandiosity of the natural and man-made world is paraded through breathtaking shots accompanied by Philip Glass’s electrifying score. Man’s relationship to the environment is inferred based on how the images are sequenced and how the music builds the mood. Even without dialogue, the narrative is multilayered. Photographers of various sorts will surely take delight in the film’s visuals. Beyond the aesthetics, viewers will also gain insight into humanity.

7. Understanding Walter Benjamin’s Essay: Certified Copy 

Abbas Kiarostami’s 2010 film is all about the copy and the original; hence, an intriguing watch that can be read against Walter Benjamin’s 1935 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. At the time of his writing, photography had gained its footing in mass media. As such, critics like Benjamin have pondered its implications for culture and the arts.

In Certified Copy, British author James Miller and an unnamed French antique dealer converse about different facets of authenticity. The question of what is real is also reflected in the relationship between the two characters that undergo a confounding transformation throughout the film. Consuming texts from scholars like Benjamin and watching related films can deepen one’s photographic practice.

8. Trusting the Process: Mysterious Object at Noon 

This is a cinematic equivalent of the surrealist game Exquisite Corpse as the narrative develops through the imagination of the people encountered by the filmmaker around Thailand. Metaphysical matters, lingering shots, lush tropical environments—these signatures are already apparent in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s 2000 debut feature film.

Succeeding films by Joe (as he’s called by fans and family) have since been featured in international film festivals in places like Cannes and Venice. His other visual works— video installation, and photography—have also been exhibited in international museums and galleries. Crudeness is expected as one begins to explore and experiment with one’s style. The important thing is to continue practicing and this film could help you do that.

9. Rethinking Your Purpose: The Spectre of Hope 

This 2002 documentary by Paul Carlin stages the discourse between photographer Sebastião Salgado and art critic John Berger as they reflect on the effect of globalization on mass displacement. Aware of his privilege and responsibility as a documentarian, Salgado hopes to portray humanity through his images. They also contemplate the idea of hope, which Berger defines as something that is not related to optimism but rather something that occurs in very dark moments… like a flame in the darkness. Beyond documentary photographers and photojournalists, photographers in other disciplines can expand their perspectives on society at large, prompting further reflection on one’s purpose in pursuing their practice.

10. Digging Through Photography Archives: To Pick a Flower 

In her 2021 video essay, Shireen Seno presents archival photographs of a town established by an American industrialist in the Philippines during their colonial rule. With a mix of research and inference, she analyzes the power relations between man and nature. She also observes the difference between the colonizer and the colonized vis-à-vis their demeanor towards nature. Outside their usual users, the archives are underutilized resources, rich with unexplored narratives. Digging seeds from the past can enrich one’s understanding of the present.

wetransfer presents the day I met björk as a show & online zine

WeTransfer announces The Day I Met Björk, an exhibition and a free, downloadable zine of unseen photographs of Icelandic singer-songwriter Björk, captured by Spike Jonze and curated by fashion designer Humberto Leon. The series unveils over 25 previously unseen images taken by the American filmmaker in the summer of 1995 at the Chateau Marmont in the days prior to shooting Björk’s seminal music video ‘It’s Oh So Quiet.’ Of the thousands of photos taken that day, only six were published, becoming classics in the Björk canon. 

all images © Spike Jonze

a rare glimpse into spike jonze’s iconic meet with the singer

The Day I Met Björk launched on February 15, 2024, at Humberto Leon‘s LA restaurant and gallery space Arroz & Fun. The fashion designer discovered the outtakes long treasured by the singer’s fans, while helping Spike Jonze organize his archive. ‘When I came across these photos at Spike’s I knew, as a longtime fan of both he and Björk, that they were special and needed to be seen. I remember being a college kid and seeing the originals in Detour, they were instantly iconic to me. It’s an honor to help bring these photos out from the archive for fans everywhere to see for the first time,’ Leon shares. 

The Day I Met Björk, announced by WeTransfer and curated by Humberto Leon

WeTransfer’s support of The Day I Met Björk is one in a series of collaborations initiated via its arts platform, WePresent — fostering a sense of community among creators by offering its platform as a hub where they can distribute content to their fans. ‘The meeting of Spike Jonze and Björk almost 30 years ago resulted in now iconic photography and one of the most referential music videos of the 90s. The fact that we now get to revisit that meeting and share never-before-seen images with people around the world is so exciting,’ comments Holly Fraser, VP, Content at WeTransfer. To bring the images to fans around the world, a limited edition commemorative zine featuring never-before-seen contact sheets and a conversation between Jonze and Leon is available to download now globally for free here. Limited physical copies are available at the exhibition.

25 previously unseen images taken by Spike Jonze in the summer of 1995 at the Chateau Marmont

revisiting an iconic duo’s encounter

The Day I Met Björk is also available as an online zine

There are 30,000 photographs lurking on my computer, all of them from the last few years. If you know me, you are not surprised by that number. If you are like me, you might have even more on your computer. But this throng of images makes me wonder what drives my greedy stockpiling of fleeting moments, most of them not particularly momentous.

It started early. One of my stand-out childhood memories of Christmas is of unwrapping a boxy Polaroid Land camera, my “big gift” one year in the late 1960s. In that moment, I felt as if my parents really did know who I was and who I hoped to become. No number of pixels in my phone will ever compare to the eerie magic of watching my first Polaroid image slowly come into being — a blurry close-up of our dog Chrissie, if I remember right.

I’ve been taking photographs ever since. It has, at times, been part of my job. But mostly it’s been a reflexive way to mark time and change. Sometimes it’s a mediation, and sometimes it’s a way to transform a dull moment into a fun game.

Since moving back to this area, the bleak expanse of January and February has become my favorite time for taking pictures. It’s easier to stay close to home and look more intently at a familiar world transformed. Snow turns the landscape into an etching. The play of ice and water in the creek is infinitely varied. Winter sunlight is so pure, and the shadows so sharp.

A couple of weeks ago, my friend Abby and I spent a day wandering around Holyoke in that crispy winter sunshine taking photographs of empty paper mills stretched out along the canals, their brick walls turned into canvases for graffiti art, barely another pedestrian to be seen but still the occasional hopeful art gallery or coffee shop or row of curtained windows hinting at lives inside.

My favorite images from that day are of the windows in an empty old brick building. They’d been covered with warped plexiglass, and in the sharp winter sunshine reflected a wildly distorted image of the boxy modern gray-and-white building across the street.

Why are so many of us devoted to this particular form of memorializing daily experience? Photographic images have become so ubiquitous that one might assume they have lost their power to surprise us or shift our perceptions. (According to researchers, we humans are taking an estimated 5 billion photos every day, and about 93 million of them are selfies.)

While never particularly trustworthy — the camera has always been an accomplished liar — photographs in the age of artificial intelligence seem to be rapidly becoming both more “realistic” and less “true.”

There’s a phrase that pops up over and over again in serious-minded conversations about the “why” of making photographs: “Every photograph is a self-portrait.” The first time I encountered it, I didn’t think much of it. But then I heard it in a photography class, read it in a book and then in another book. Then I saw it in a photo blog.

Oddly, almost every time I come across this quote it is attributed to a different well-known photographer. Some attribute it to Minor White, a master of the black-and-white print with an interest in Zen philosophy; others cite Sally Mann, known for large-format photographs of her family and domestic surroundings; and still others reference the great Depression-era photographer Dorothea Lange.

I can’t argue with that bunch, so there must be something to it. Perhaps it is the intensity with which a photographer sees and in that moment responds to what she or he sees. It can certainly be a way of projecting yourself onto the world while also standing back, and of capturing not just what you see but how you see it.

On the other hand, sometimes we push the shutter for the sheer fun of it — to catch the way a rising winter sun can turn my mare Maizie into a balloon animal, and turn me into Gumby’s giant stretchy sister. Yes, this photo is a self-portrait. But that is certainly not the point.