Executive produced by Wes Anderson, D.W. Young’s film puts Village Voice photographer James Hamilton in the spotlight.

Even if you don’t know James Hamilton‘s name, you probably recognize some of his images. Over a career that has spanned seven decades and seen his work published in Harper’s Bazaar, The New York Observer, New York Magazine and The Village Voice, Hamilton has photographed music and film superstars, legendary directors, notorious criminals and powerful politicians, as well as wars, famines and revolutions.

So if Uncropped occasionally meanders — sometimes into stories debatably more deserving of 111-minute treatment than the casually, thoughtfully rumpled Hamilton — it’s easy to think that Hamilton would modestly agree, or at least acknowledge that he’s somewhat a pivot-point here. Somebody flashier — “flash” pun intended, since Hamilton’s use of photographic flash is one of many topics in discussion — might have resisted being used as a vehicle to tap into myriad other topics; with Hamilton it comes comfortably, making him all the easier to admire by the time the closing credits roll.

As his career intersects with the transitional cultural scene that was New York City in the 1970s, Uncropped begins to pick up steam. As it hits Hamilton’s Village Voice years, the documentary is locked into a story that’s more fascinating than a mere biography, or at least the biography of one man.

Uncropped becomes the biography of a bygone journalistic moment. You can mourn the access that was central to so much of Hamilton’s finest portraiture. He was able to spend full afternoons just hanging out with subjects like Alfred Hitchcock without a publicist in sight. He would go to parties where the attending celebrities weren’t constantly posing for selfies and, thus, where actual candid images were possible. He was able to shoot his own pictures, develop his own pictures, insist that those pictures go to print without outside editing and, when it was finished, he would own the negatives. It points to Hamilton’s generally even-keeled attitude that he paints these generational discrepancies in broad strokes without irritation or incredulity. In fact, you have to wait until Hamilton talks about Jared Kushner’s acquisition of The New York Observer to see him get fiery about anything.

The celebration of The Village Voice is easily the documentary’s best chapter, as an assortment of Voice luminaries — Mark Jacobson! Thulani Davis! Michael Daly! Joe Conason! — share memories, sometimes solo and sometimes sitting with Hamilton, sometimes situating Hamilton at the center of the stories and sometimes not. If you’re interested in photojournalism, the conversations between Hamilton and Sylvia Plachy, his fellow Voice shutterbug (and Adrien Brody’s mom), are absolute gold. They banter about composition and spontaneity, comparing and contrasting their respective styles, each with boundless admiration for the other.

The Village Voice material boosts everything around it, as Young brings out an amusing assortment of friends and partners to talk about how subsequently eclectic Hamilton’s career has been. Wes Anderson, also an executive producer on the documentary, is unusually animated recounting how he recruited Hamilton to be his regular on-set photographer. Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, and wife Eva Prinz, sit with Hamilton for what feels like a charming cup of afternoon coffee. And Hamilton loosens up as well, with poignant stories about his friendship with Bill Paxton and the accident that effectively ended his journalistic career.

By the end, I’d mostly shaken my feeling that Young would have been better off doing a documentary about alt-weeklies in which Hamilton was a featured participant, rather than the other way around. It’s enough to understand the fertile environments that publications like the Voice or Los Angeles Weekly became, the talented people who were nurtured there, and what we’ve lost in having those papers either shuttered entirely or devalued beyond recognition.

And man, James Hamilton’s pictures are tremendous, and a serious-minded look at an artistry that’s rarely afforded this kind of spotlight is a valuable thing.