Other People's Pictures (2004) User Reviews

Nice documentary I found on the wonderful Documentary Channel

[The_Mean_Reds · 10/10 · 27 November 2009]

"Other People's Pictures" is about the different photograph collectors who go to New York's Chelsea Flea Market to literally sit for hours combing through boxes and boxes of decades old snapshots discarded over the years by anyone and everyone from around the world. Most of the photographs people sift through seemed to be turn of the century to about the 1960's. As I began to read about this film, I thought how pointless it is to collect random snapshots. Little did I know that this is indeed a rewarding hobby. There is about one in a thousand snapshots that serious collectors deem aesthetically significant and truly "beautiful". These photos can fetch fifty bucks or more...others are maybe a quarter to a dollar a piece. Of the stories from some of the collectors interviewed, one was about a man who collected to bring back old memories of his broken childhood. His family divorce when he was a kid in the late Fifties and all photographic evidence of his childhood was destroyed. He collected pictures that reminded him of his family in a very touching way. Another man told a story of how his Polish parents' family was lost in the Holocaust. He collected pictures of Nazis who were photographed in everyday life-their homes, with their families, et cetera. He explained how those photographs represented the "banality of evil", further explaining that any one of these Nazis could have been responsible for the demise of any of his family members. For anyone who appreciates good photography, this will definitely inspire you to collect photos like the people at the Chelsea Flea Market.