Shoot the People: Misan Harriman documentary questions the power and purpose of protest imagery

Individuals strain a little too hard to translate their subjects’ lives into familiar emotional terms. But Shoot the People does not chase a reductive notion of ‘relatability’. It allows its subject, the British photographer Misan Harriman, to remain exceptional. By the film’s closing stretch, it begins to feel less like the document of an intriguing career than a contemporary hero’s origin story.

Harriman came to prominence photographing the George Floyd protests before becoming the first Black man to shoot the cover of British Vogue – startlingly, his first professional photography commission. His debut short film, The After (2023), earned an Academy Award nomination. But what this film conveys is that Harriman is less interested in personal triumphs than the platform they afford him to illuminate others’ struggles. Andy Mundy-Castle follows his subject’s lead, resisting biographical spectacle and contextualising his photography and the values that drive it.

There is something deeper than directorial craft at work in the film’s most nuanced moments. Both Mundy-Castle and Harriman are Black British filmmakers who have navigated an industry that has consistently underestimated and underfunded work like theirs; that shared experience registers on screen.

Harriman is repeatedly framed in close, steady compositions which emphasise a figure perpetually assessing the stakes at hand. The camera’s attentiveness to his inner workings occasionally borders on reverence, though the effect is mitigated by Harriman’s own rigorous self-consciousness about the ethics of the spotlight.

That reflective streak gives the documentary its most valuable friction. In conversations with the American congresswoman Ilhan Omar and Martin Luther King III, Harriman questions the efficacy of political photography. But then in South Africa he visits the home of his hero, photographer and freedom fighter Peter Magubane, who tirelessly documented the resistance to apartheid. Though inspired by his predecessor, he continues to struggle with the clash between documenting injustice and earning social currency from it. The sequences where Harriman regains clarity and returns to protests to pound pavement, camera in hand, are when the film is at its most alive.

Harriman emerges as someone unusually certain of the ethical obligations of image-making and power. It is a quality Mundy-Castle honours with the shared belief that bearing honest witness is, in the end, only the beginning.

► Shoot the People is in UK cinemas 10 July