Documentarian Dan Wechsler turns the camera on street photographer Matt Weber in MORE THAN THE RAINBOW

MORE THAN THE RAINBOW (Dan Wechsler, 2012)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Opens Friday, May 2
212-255-2243
www.quadcinema.com
www.lespedi.com

“I need to be kind of weird to photograph people all the time without permission, because it’s very aggressive, and I have to do it,” street photographer Matt Weber says at the beginning of Dan Wechsler’s fun documentary More Than the Rainbow, adding, “And you have to be kind of a psycho.” Wechsler — a filmmaker and rare bookseller who, with George Koppelman, has just claimed to have discovered William Shakespeare’s annotated dictionary — follows Weber around New York, primarily in the subways and Coney Island, as the former taxi driver tries to capture the spirit of the city on film, looking for unique shots that can come and go in a flash. Wechsler speaks with such other photographers as Ralph Gibson, who waxes poetic about the art form, sometimes in French; Dave Beckerman, who gave up a successful business career to shoot on the streets; Philadelphia’s Zoe Strauss, whose “10 Years” exhibition was recently at ICP; Jeff Mermelstein, a street photographer who shoots mostly in color; critic and photographer Ben Lifson, who passed away last year; Cuban-born photographer Julio Mitchel; and, most curiously, San Francisco–based fetish photographer Erik Kroll, who doesn’t care for Weber’s work. Weber, who has been photographing the city since 1978, is also shown collaborating with Todd Oldham, who is designing a book on Weber’s subway series. All of the photographers discuss the relative merits of color versus black-and-white, whether they ask people for permission before taking their pictures, and the inherent differences between analog and digital. The film often strays too far from its main subject, Weber, losing sight of itself in its effort to cover too much in a mere eighty-three minutes, but it usually gets back on track, particularly with lovely 35mm interstitial trips through the city, in color and black-and-white, set to the music of Thelonius Monk and Keith Gurland, courtesy of John Rosenberg, who edited the film and music and shot the documentary with Arlene Muller. Especially in an age when everyone thinks he or she is a photographer, snapping photos with camera phones and posting them on social media sites, More Than a Rainbow shows how it’s really done. The film opens at the Quad on May 2, with Wechsler and Weber participating in Q&As following the 8:30 screenings on Friday and Saturday.