Photography

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

Laura Poitras’s 2022 documentary follows photographer and activist Nan Goldin across five decades — from her early portraits of New York’s queer and AIDS-affected communities to her founding of P.A.I.N. and protests against the Sackler family’s role in the opioid crisis. Built almost entirely from Goldin’s own archive and recent footage of museum demonstrations, the film frames art-making and political action as inseparable practices of truth-telling.

Daguerréotypes

Made in 1975 on Paris’s Rue Daguerre, Agnès Varda’s Daguerréotypes is a quietly radical documentary composed of static portraits of local shopkeepers and residents, all filmed within ninety metres of her home. Each subject answers three questions about origin and arrival, their responses left unedited and unframed by commentary. Nurith Aviv and William Lubtchansky’s cinematography is unobtrusive and naturalistic; Varda’s direction is resolutely local, anti-extractive, and typologically curious. The film treats the street as both subject and limit—offering not analysis, but sustained attention.

Everlasting Moments

Set in early-20th-century Malmö, Everlasting Moments follows Maria Larsson, a Finnish immigrant who wins a camera in a lottery and begins taking photographs — of her children, the dead, monarchs — as a slow, unspoken assertion of self. Directed by Jan Troell with deliberate, grainy 16 mm imagery and restrained performances, it treats time, class and visibility as physical presences, not abstractions. Based loosely on a true story, it avoids biography in favour of accumulated detail, finding resonance in silence, gesture and the chemical patience of early photography.

Peter Hujar’s Day

Set in a SoHo apartment in 1974, Peter Hujar’s Day reconstructs a single day in the photographer’s life through his real-time recollection for writer Linda Rosenkrantz. Directed by Ira Sachs and starring Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall, it unfolds almost entirely in one room, trusting the rhythms of speech, silence, and memory over conventional narrative. Shot by Alex Ashe and edited by Affonso Gonçalves, the film honours the granularity of artistic labour — developing film, negotiating commissions, navigating fame — without embellishment or explanation.

Varda by Agnès

Varda by Agnès is Agnès Varda’s last film: a self-directed documentary in which, at eighty-nine, she reflects on her six-decade career in photography and film. Seated, speaking directly to camera, she watches excerpts from her own work and comments on them with characteristic clarity, wit and warmth. Structured around the words inspiration, creation and sharing, it is less a historical account than an act of sustained authorial presence — intimate, unhurried, materially attentive. Edited by Varda herself, it privileges texture, recurrence and silence over exposition or argument.

Blowup

Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 English-language debut follows a London fashion photographer who believes he has photographed a murder — only to find that each enlargement deepens uncertainty rather than clarifying truth. Shot on location across Swinging London, with Carlo Di Palma’s restrained cinematography and Herbie Hancock’s sparse jazz score, Blowup uses photographic process as metaphor for perception itself. It won the Palme d’Or, helped end Hollywood’s Production Code, and remains a touchstone for films about mediation, alienation, and the instability of the image.

The Terrorizers

A 1986 Taiwanese drama by Edward Yang, The Terrorizers traces intersecting lives in Taipei — a depressed novelist, a photographer obsessed with a stranger, a hospital worker unraveling professionally and personally — bound by miscommunication, mediated images, and unspoken grief. Its structure resists resolution, favouring spatial and temporal disorientation over narrative closure.

Alexander Rodchenko

Instant camera

The SX-70 and model 95 Land Camera are industrial design decisions that replaced photographic process with photographic moment. They achieved seamlessness by embedding chemistry, timing, and ejection into hardware — not software, not service, not instruction. No claim is made about aesthetics, mass production, or longevity. Only this: they moved development from darkroom to device, and from ritual to reflex.

Rudy VanderLans

Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly

Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly is a survival horror game developed and published by Tecmo in 2003. Players control Mio Amakura exploring the haunted Minakami Village, often alongside or searching for her sister Mayu. Exploration uses a fixed third-person camera, shifting to first-person when using the Camera Obscura—the primary tool for solving puzzles (via photographing objects and solving riddles) and fighting ghosts. Ghosts are signaled by coloured filaments (blue for friendly, red for hostile), and combat requires precise framing and timing, including mid-attack shots and the 'Shutter Chance' mechanic. Mayu’s presence aids puzzle-solving but also exposes her to ghost attacks, and both sisters’ health is critical—excessive damage ends the game. The narrative centres on a cursed twin ritual tied to the village’s history, with multiple endings determined by player choices, especially regarding Mayu’s fate.

Fatal Frame (video game)

Fatal Frame (2001) is a survival horror game developed by Tecmo. It places the player as Miku Hinasaki inside a real-time-rendered Japanese mansion. Navigation uses a semi-fixed camera and flashlight in total darkness. Hostile ghosts are sensed via a 'sixth sense', drain health on contact, and can only be defeated using the Camera Obscura—an antique camera operated in first-person view with dual-stick controls. Damage depends on framing duration and proximity, though ghosts intermittently fade. Film serves as limited, graded ammunition. Progress is gated by puzzles and saved at designated points and chapter ends.

Shanghai Pharmaceuticals

AbbVie

AstraZeneca

Aurobindo Pharma

Cipla

Daiichi Sankyo

Dr. Reddy's Laboratories

Dr. Reddy's Laboratories is a business case in disciplined vertical progression: API → branded formulation → export credential → finished product. Its early wins were tactical, not structural. No data on scale, margins, or longevity is provided — only sequence, timing, and pricing intent.

Eisai (company)

Camera phone

Photogrammetry

GoPro

GoPro is a hardware product line defined by physical constraints and use-case discipline—not AI, cloud, or ecosystem. Its value lies in solving one narrow problem exceptionally well: rugged, wide-angle, first-person video capture. Its evolution from 35mm film to digital HD reflects adaptation—not disruption.

Color photography

JPEG

JPEG is a 1992 DCT-based lossy compression standard. It delivers predictable 10:1 size reduction with acceptable visual trade-offs. It defines only the codec—not the file format. Its lossless mode is unused. It remains dominant not by superiority but by inertia.

Photographic film

Eastman did not invent photography. He invented the first scalable, separable, service-integrated imaging system — and made it flammable, proprietary, and profitable.

Photorealism

Susan Sontag

Palm Angels

I-D