Reely and Truly is a Visual Poem for Photographers (Short Film)

Photography Tips

If you’re a lover of master photography, you’ll love this new film clip from director Tyrone Lebon. In a mere 30-minutes, Lebon manages to exquisitely intertwine intimate interviews with some of today’s most celebrated photographers. His film provides an exploration of the nature of the ‘reality’ of photography, all within a surreal collage that takes on the form of a visual poem:

Note: This short film contains some explicit language and images.

Shot on all the available celluloid film formats (65mm, 35mm, super 16mm, 16mm, and super 8mm), Reely and Truly was created as an extended trailer for a project that will culminate in a book of photos, texts and films about more than 30 contemporary photographers. That being said, Reely and Truly seems like less of a teaser and more of a filmic journey through a kaleidoscope of places and the contemporary photographers that love them.

Perhaps most compelling for the philosophers among us is the film’s focus on truth, lies, and photography’s relationship to them. For example:

“This is a film about photography, and therefore about lies. Even the nature of truth….possibly a lie about a lie; or a truth about the Truth.”

and

“When we start taking comfort in photography’s documenting of the real, we tend to forget its most sinister relationship with the unreal. The reassuringly objective could become to pursue the treacherously subjective in photographs, and this is the pleasure as well as the menace of photography, whose archives are as full of fiction as of truth.”

And after perusing the ins and outs of photography’s documenting of the real and “its most sinister relationship with the unreal,” we’re then invited to join the poet John Keats in his “negative capability,” being capable of dwelling “in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after facts and fiction.”

In the end, Reely and Truly is as much an ode to the art of photography as anything. It makes you fall in love with photography all over again.