If you love to hate humankind; if what makes you happy is the certainty that all individuals are self-interested, self-seeking, self-centered; if your misanthropy is the sort that gets excited by the spectacle of human-to-human nastiness, cruelty, malice—particularly when the persons involved are close or related (mother betrays son for money, son betrays father because he desires his stepmother, a woman sleeps with her sister's husband in her sister's own bed); if the meanness of the human condition is your pleasure, then The Photographer, His Wife, Her Lover is your documentary.

From the movie's start to its end, you are among the jackals, the panthers, the scorpions, the vultures, the monsters, squealing, yelling, and crawling in the infamous menagerie of their vices. The wonderfully nasty story involves a love triangle—the 20th-century photographer Ogle Winston Link; his second wife, Conchita; and her lover, Ed Hayes. Conchita married Ogle in 1983, when she was 48 and he 69. In his black-and-white photographs she saw nothing but green. The year they married, Ogle had his first big show of his work, the bulk of which was taken in the '50s and captured the twilight of the railroad age in America. The pictures show small-town white folks doing this and that outdoor activity at night (watching a movie, sitting by a swimming pool, filling a gas tank) as trains rushed by like the ghosts they were becoming.

Because the mind behind these images was second-rate, their success in the '80s had more to do with timing than talent. The Reagan era saw the Eisenhower era as a kind of paradise from which America had fallen—and to which it had to return. Caught in Link's photographs was the pre-civil-rights, pre-Stonewall, pre-antiwar world that Reagan's age regarded as the "happy days." Link's money-hungry wife saw that now was the time and put his career on the fast track.

Not long after attaining great wealth and fame, Link discovered that his rich wife was cheating on him with the man he hired to rebuild a dead train engine. There was no room for even an ounce of forgiveness; his will was dedicated to one goal: to destroy Conchita. And he did. With the most powerful lawyers in the world, he reduced her to nothing, got her thrown into prison for "stealing" his photographs, and mocked by the art world she once had under her thumb.

There's no clear right or wrong in this documentary. Ogle is not totally honest about what she did to him; Conchita is not totally honest about what he did to her. At the end of the divorce, the lawyers are richer, the photographer is dead, his wife is paying a heavy debt to society, and her lover is penniless.

All of this, sadly, is shot in ugly video. If the director (Paul Yule) had used a better camera, sophisticated editing and lighting—in short, if he had injected a good dose of cinema into this documentary—then it would have been wholesome for those of us who love to see humans being mean to humans. C'est le diable qui tient les fils qui nous remuent.

charles@thestranger.com