A Boston winter’s day in 1947: Edwin Land, a Harvard-dropout chemist with a showman’s flair, peels a damp square from his prototype camera. 60 seconds later a child’s portrait appears, and the instant photograph - the first Polaroid - is born.
Fast-forward to 1990. On the rubble-lined streets of East Berlin, seven young photographers hoist second-hand Nikons, desperate to capture a country rebuilding itself before their very eyes.
Switch to New York’s Coney Island boardwalk, where teenage Brooklynite Harold Feinstein trades jokes for smiles, coaxing strangers to kiss, laugh and eat hot-dogs into his Leica.
And in a Paris studio flooded with white light, German-Jewish exile Erwin Blumenfeld orders a model’s face sliced by a black lace veil. One solarised exposure later, fashion photography has a new playbook.
To celebrate National Camera Day on 29 June—and the surge of photo festivals from New York to Arles—iWonder brings together the films that tell these stories in all their chemical, political and emotional complexity.
Ostkreuz: Agency of the Photographers
Seven East-German shooters, one vanished country, endless questions
"Can a picture be honest, when the ground beneath the tripod is still shifting?"
When the Berlin Wall fell, history didn’t pause to pose; it sprinted. Ostkreuz was born in that sprint, a co-op of seven East-German photographers who believed the only way to understand reunification was to watch it, relentlessly, through a lens.
Director Maik Reichert follows the collective for 5 volatile years. He sits in on bruising critique sessions where egos clash over what counts as truth. He trails members into coal towns, border crossings, and velvet-rope art fairs, exposing a nation wrestling with its own image just as fiercely as the photographers framing it. The result is both newsroom thriller and philosophical quest: can a picture be honest when the ground beneath the tripod is still shifting?
Watch because:
- Prize-winner at DOK Leipzig, One of Europe’s largest doc festivals, and required viewing in Germany’s photo schools
- Shows reunification through photographers’ contact sheets, not politicians’ speeches—raw, urgent, unrepeatable
Subito: Instant Photography
“Press, wait… ready!”—70 years of Polaroid magic
If you’ve ever fanned a grey Polaroid in the air, you owe a debt to Edwin Land, the show-man-scientist whose instant-camera empire once sold a million packs of film a day.
Volkart’s documentary flips through those decades like a deck of snapshots. There is Edwin Land dazzling a department-store audience in 1947 or Andy Warhol, the pop-artist, treating his SX-70 like an autograph book.
We see the digital wave that bankrupted Polaroid in 2001, and finally the 2008 cliff-hanger when a Dutch-Austrian startup called The Impossible Project rescued the last Polaroid factory, reverse-engineered the lost chemistry from scratch, and sparked the modern analogue renaissance.
It’s part corporate epic, part chemistry lesson, and a reminder that unpredictability is sometimes the point of taking a picture.
Watch because:
- Swiss Film Award nominee and audience favourite at Zurich FF: nostalgia with the narrative snap of The Social Network.
- Explains why your favourite influencers just bought a second-hand SX-70—and why it still matters.
The Man Who Shot Beautiful Women
Erwin Blumenfeld: Surrealist rebel turned Vogue superstar
Long before Photoshop, Erwin Blumenfeld was bending reality inside a camera. A Berlin Dadaist turned Paris fashion photographer, he fled the Nazis, survived an internment camp, then landed in 1940s New York and promptly reinvented the glossy magazine cover.
His 1950 Vogue portrait of Lisa Fonssagrives—only a red lip and a veiled eye—still hangs in MoMA as a lesson in minimal seduction. Director Nick Watson’s film opens Blumenfeld’s private archive of contact sheets, nudes and anti-Hitler photomontages, tracing a mind that never stopped experimenting. Solarisation, multiple exposure, extreme cropping—techniques we take for granted were once acts of artistic brinkmanship, and Blumenfeld bet his career on every one.
Watch because:
- BBC Storyville selection and Sheffield Doc/Fest spotlight—catnip for fashion, design and modern-art buffs.
- Combines haute couture glamour with a real-life wartime escape thriller.
The Man Who Shot New York
Harold Feinstein: Coney Island’s poet with a Leica
While photography giants like Weegee—born Arthur Fellig, the cigar-chomping press photographer whose flash-lit crime scenes defined New York noir—prowled Manhattan’s night beat, Brooklyn-raised Harold Feinstein aimed his Leica at something almost radical for 1940s street photography: happiness.
From the age of 15 he captured the frothy life of New York's Coney Island—soldiers home from war, teenage sweethearts on roller-coasters, churro vendors grinning through steam. Over 50 years he amassed a trove of 35 mm negatives, half of them never printed.
Director Andy Humphries pairs that treasure with Feinstein’s soulful commentary, asking why a photographer dubbed “one of the most accomplished recorders of the American experience” was overlooked for so long.
Watch because:
- Hot Docs and DOC NYC official selection—critics call it “sunshine you can stream.”
- A masterclass in finding dignity, humour and democracy in everyday faces—perfect antidote to headline doom-scrolling.
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