The best photodocumentary you can watch on YouTube

Yesterday I watched:

Produced by Showtime, the production house of Californication, specializing in borderline stories, The Indivuadilist shows us the artistic life of a great photographer: Ricky Powell. And this documentary has impacted me like no other has so far. This is a sincere, humane portrait, devastating in some ways, aware that life implies tragedy, but it is also a portrait of a true artist.

Ricky Powell was not only a photographer but he was the photographer of the hip hop scene.

Ricky Powell was a true street photographer as he proudly called himself. And this enhances the insight Cheryl Dunn had in her Everybody Street which, of course, also included Ricky. This underlines a condition rather than an idea that street photography is a genre to be pigeonholed within certain aesthetic and approach rules. And rather it tells us that street photography is above all the experience. Choosing to photograph on the street rather than in a studio. The metropolitan animal being.

Wasn't Ricky Powell a street photographer? I believe so and much more than others who profess street photography but aren't street photography at all, thinking of scrupulously observing certain impositions fallen from above but without really being able to grasp the essence of the street. Ricky Powell aka the Ricksters embodied more than many the true essence of the metropolitan photographer, stray if you will, set more in the public space than in the private. A true artist, but also sensitive and therefore fragile. Like a photographer Basquiat. And so the dissolution came for him when he felt that certain relationships had changed, experiencing them as a betrayal, as a breaking point that led him to dangerous refuges.

However, Ricky Powell has given us the essence or at least a portion of the idea of what a street photographer is like. An extraordinary talent who took snapshots and not overly lacquered and posed photographs. He photographed life, the real behind the scenes of music stars. A true street photographer who never ceases to be so if he is inside a club, backstage at a concert, making his life into art.

To be there. This is the essence of a street photographer. And the Rickster was there in the moments that turned into iconic photographs, for this reason so loved by the portrayed themselves, as can be read in the pride of LL Cool J who looks with real admiration at the photos Ricky took of him. I have seen many documentaries dedicated to photographers but this becomes my absolute favorite.

Now you can watch it. Let me know what you think.