Smoke is evocative, mysterious, moody, and unpredictable.  It can both interfere with and enhance a photograph.  It is also the title of my favorite photography movie, even though it is not really a movie about photography.

There is no definitive list of best photography movies. Some people think of documentaries or biographies of real life photographers. Others focus on fiction, where there is not much to choose from.  Almost everyone includes Blow Up, most include Rear Window, and after that the lists disperse, and are not very impressive. In my quick research, I only found one list that even included my favorite photography movie, in a discussion forum on Flickr. It is no surprise to me that a discussion among amateur photography enthusiasts was the only one to include this film, because Smoke celebrates exactly that type of photography. It also includes a scene, in the first clip below, in which a photographer sees one of his photographs elicits a response in his a viewer that most photographers would pay to evoke.

Photography actually only occupies a limited portion of the movie.  In fact, I think every scene involving photography is included in the YouTube clips that are in this post, yet they are an integral part of the story of the central character, Augie, and the topic of photography and cameras also closes the movie.  Actually, Smoke is one of those movies with no single topic or plot.  It is a group of interconnected yet separate stories centered around a single character, Augie, who manages a tobacco shop at the corner of Seventh Avenue and Third Street in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Since finding these clips, I have watched and rewatched them several times, but it has been a few years since I watched the entire movie, so forgive me if I misremember a few details.

This scene introduces us to Augie’s photography project, shows him sharing it with a friend, and eliciting the extreme reaction that I mentioned above.

Everything from here includes spoilers, so it’s going below the fold and consider yourself warned, but if you watch the clip I don’t really add anything new.

There are so many things I love in this scene. William Hurt’s character Paul is an author suffering from writer’s block, and worse, since his wife was killed in a robbery. He is friends of a sort with Augie, but clearly does not really know him until this scene kicks off a closer relationship. I love Augie’s very brief moment of disappointment and resignation just after Paul expresses surprise that he takes pictures and does more than just run the tobacco shop. I love Augie’s response, “that’s what people see, but that ain’t necessarily what I am,” even though I disagree, or would put it differently. Augie is a store manager because that is what he does. He is also something other than a store manager because he does something else. He takes photos, and so he is a photographer. Behavior is truth. I love that Augie has one single project, but does it every day. I love that he carefully prints his images and arranges them in albums, even though very few people, indeed almost nobody, will see them, in the early 1990s before the Internet explodes. I love that moments after Paul shows the slightest interest in his project Augie manages to get them both in a kitchen with beers, smokes, and a few dozen photo albums. I love the scene of Augie taking one of his morning shots. We don’t see him set up, but you can imagine him looking for a mark on the pavement to make sure he hits the same spot every day. We see him take the photo based not on what he sees but solely based on his watch, which he almost certainly sets to the exact time regularly. I love how he looks through the viewfinder after taking the shot, probably to make certain he had everything set right, because in the film era there was no way to check the result until the roll was done and processed. I love how you can imagine him buying rolls of 24 or 36 images, shooting one each day, and taking each roll to a drugstore or photo shop to be developed, and carefully dating and placing each image in its proper spot in his albums, which he probably has indexed on 3×5 cards. Most of all, I love his soliloquy:

They’re all the same. But each one is different from every other one. You’ve got your bright mornings and your dark mornings. You’ve got your summer light and your autumn light. You’ve got your weekdays and your weekends. You’ve got your people in overcoats and galoshes, and you’ve got your people in T-shirts and shorts. Sometimes the same people, sometimes different ones. Sometimes the different ones become the same, and the same ones disappear. The earth revolves around the sun, and every day the light from the sun hits the earth at a different angle.

The parallels to my own work is obvious to me, and I haven’t heard or read a better apologia for photography as art anywhere. I expect many of my photography friends will see this as applicable to their work, as well.

As best as I can remember, the photography theme does not reappear until the end of the movie, which is shown in the two clips below. In the first, Augie tells Paul the story of how he came to own his camera; in the second, we see the story enacted without words but to a haunting Tom Waits song. Paul seems to believe that Augie is making it up, but I disagree. Either way it is a beautiful story.

There is a lot to love in this movie. It is also flawed. Like many movies with no single driving plot it can meander a bit, and some of the interwoven stories are less compelling than others, but overall it has stayed lodged in my mind for 15 years. I recommend it to any photographer.