ARTnews, March 2008

Peter Beard famously shrugged off his 1967 Life magazine cover—an off-the-cuff shot of a startled elephant—saying, "This isn't a great photo, but it's a great elephant." In Guillaume Bonn's documentary, Peter Beard: Scrapbooks from Africa and Beyond, he elaborates: surrendering to the "accident factor" was the only way to capture Africa's "freedom-infested" landscape. The film makes its television debut on the 6th of this month on the Sundance Channel in a weeklong series of photography documentaries.

Tina Barney: Social Studies opens the cycle on the 3rd and follows the photographer on a portrait study of Europe's upper class—what she describes as the "real McCoy" counterparts to stiffly staged Ralph Lauren ads. Director Jaci Judelson occasionally shoots through Barney's viewfinder while the photographer describes her own privileged upbringing or chats up her subjects about designer shoes and mutual royal friends.

On the 5th, Heinz Bütler's Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Impassioned Eye, shows the notoriously shy photographer, who died in 2004, open up about his methods. A 1947 photo of men sitting on a Boston lawn, he says, illustrates "the joy of geometry: when you realize everything is right."