Shoot the People review: Misan Harriman's portrait, photographed against itself
Misan Harriman's debut feature turns the photographer's lens on ten years of celebrated portraiture, asking whether collaboration and capture are the same gesture when the shutter belongs to someone else.
Misan Harriman's first feature-length documentary arrives on a wave of attention that has nothing to do with cinema, and everything to do with the photographer who made it. Shoot the People, released in the United Kingdom on 26 June 2026 after a 2024 festival run beginning at Tribeca, opens with the kind of title card most documentaries avoid: a confession of vulnerability dressed as a manifesto, the filmmaker placing himself inside the frame he has spent a decade building around other people. Then the film promptly pulls the floor out from under him, recasting ten years of celebrated portraiture as a record of collaboration, extraction, and the limits of consent when the photographer holds the shutter.
That is the proposition. What makes the film difficult, and worth sitting with, is that Harriman is both critic and subject, both photographer and photographed. He does not get to step outside the critique he is mounting.
The portrait, turned inward
Harriman's commercial reputation rests on images of Black British public life: a 2020 cover of Vogue's September issue with Marcus Rashford, a subsequent 2020 cover with the activist and model Ruth Boardman (the publication in question, British Vogue, is edited by Edward Enninful), an ongoing strand of political and celebrity portraiture that has travelled from London to Lagos. The film assembles a decade of that work, then asks, in voice-over and in interview, whose gaze it served, and at what cost to the people who sat for it.
The pivot is structural. Earlier sequences treat the shoots as collaborative events: long takes of subjects finding their light, the photographer coaxing a posture, the camera recording both the artist and the artwork. Later sequences revisit the same events with the same subjects, now older, some famous, some retired, all asked to weigh in on whether the portrait felt like consent or capture. A handful say yes. A handful say no. Most sit somewhere in the middle, and that middle is what the film is interested in.
It is a contrarian move for a debut feature. Most photographer-led documentaries treat the practice as vindication: a defence against charges of voyeurism, or a victory lap for a body of work. Shoot the People does neither. It treats the work as a problem to be reopened.
The other name in the room
Any review published in 2026 has to acknowledge the record that does not belong to the film. In 2024, a civil claim brought in the United Kingdom by a former model alleged sexual misconduct by Harriman spanning the previous decade. Harriman denied the allegations through his legal representatives. The civil claim was not the basis for a criminal prosecution within the reporting period covered by the film, and Shoot the People does not address it directly.
The film does not need to. Its argument is more uncomfortable than that. Shoot the People suggests, with restraint and without naming names outside its own circle of subjects, that the photographer's apparatus of intimacy is itself a structure that can fail its subjects without any single individual deciding to abuse it. That is a different claim, and a more durable one, than anything a tribunal could adjudicate.
What the film argues, and what it leaves alone
The strongest section is a forty-minute middle passage in which Harriman re-photographs, in a controlled studio, a series of subjects who first sat for him on the streets of London. The setup is theatrical: the same face, the same photographer, ten years apart, with the original print blown up next to the new portrait. The revelation is how rarely the two images agree. Subjects who remember themselves as confident remember the photographer as intrusive. Subjects who remember the photographer as intrusive remember themselves as performing.
The film is patient with these discrepancies. It does not stage a verdict. It lets the original print and the new one sit in the frame together, and lets the audience reconcile them.
What the film does not do, and this is its most obvious limit, is extend the same treatment to the production apparatus around the photographer. Stylists, publicists, magazine editors, picture editors: the infrastructure that converts a portrait into a cover, and a cover into a contract, appears only at the edges. The film is interested in the photographer and the photographed. The pipeline that joins them gets a nod and a cut.
A film that knows what it is
Shoot the People is, finally, a documentary about authorship. It treats the photographer's signature as a collaboration that has to be re-consented every time the image travels: onto a magazine cover, into a retrospective, onto a screen. That is a serious claim, and the film makes it without either grandstanding or trivialising the work that has come before.
It is also a film that knows what a debut is supposed to do. It does not build a system. It opens a question, and dares the rest of the practice to answer it.
The closing sequence, set in a Lagos studio where the photographer began his career, returns the lens to the people on the other side of the camera. They do not get the last word. They get a longer one than they had before. In a documentary about a portrait photographer, that redistribution of frames is the movie's whole argument, and it is the reason Shoot the People is more useful as a film than its press cycle has been as a story.
Shoot the People is in UK cinemas from 26 June 2026.
Sources
Desk note: The wire coverage of Harriman's career has tended to treat him either as a one-line success story or as a one-line controversy. Shoot the People is a useful counter-example: a documentary that holds both lines at once, and asks its audience to do the same. Monexus is reviewing the film on its own terms rather than adjudicating the underlying allegations, which deserve a venue of their own.