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Filmmaker's 'Pieces' Shows Toni Morrison is Cut from a Different Cloth

Timothy Greenfield-Sanders' documentary weaves beloved author's life into a revealing tapestry


spinner image Toni Morrison and Timothy Greenfield-Sanders behind the scenes of Toni Morrison: The Pieces I am.
Timothy Greenfield-Sanders / Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures

Renowned portrait photographer and filmmaker Timothy Greenfield-Sanders captures the multifaceted soul of Nobel Prize– and Presidential Medal of Freedom–winning author Toni Morrison, 88, in his 13th film, Toni Morrison: The PiecesI Am, a full-length documentary.

Why tell the story of Toni Morrison's life? Toni and I have been friends for 38 years, so it is a long history of friendship and influence. She was the impetus for the Black List series [Greenfield-Sanders’ award-winning trilogy of films about prominent African Americans], which came about at a lunch at my house. We were doing some portraits, and we were talking about talented African Americans who were opera singers, and that kind of turned into the idea for the Black List — and all of those “list” films that I did. I have been very privileged to know Toni, and that friendship involved a lot of trust because she is very private.

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Toni is an iconic artist, so enormously gifted. Her work really reaches people in a way that is hard to describe.

- Timothy Greenfield-Sanders

She is often called a living legend. Toni is an iconic artist, so enormously gifted. Her work really reaches people in a way that is hard to describe. [She has] a very special way of writing, and there is a deepness to Toni that we all get out of her books. On top of that, what we show in the film is Toni's other career as a very important editor. Toni used her position at Random House to help publish works that might have had a harder time getting out there. Some people were in the streets demonstrating [during the Black Power movement], and Toni was doing her work in the publishing world, getting the written word out.

spinner image Timothy Greenfield-Sanders
Krause, Johansen/Timothy Greenfield-Sanders/Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures

Was that a surprise? I knew she was an editor in a cursory way, but I didn't know the depth of it and what it was like working with mostly white men at a time when she was one of the few black editors and how strong she was to handle [it]. There was a part of the film where people laugh when she says, “I was smarter than they were. I wasn't intimidated. I knew what I knew."

A Snapshot of Timothy Greenfield-Sanders

Age: 67

Latest work: Toni Morrison documentary

Claim to fame: intimate portraits

Find him: @tgs on Instagram

The film uses art to enhance the storytelling. We worked with the Princeton archive and Columbia and Toni's personal collection of images. When you hear the story of Morrison's family leaving Georgia [to move north to avoid Southern racism], you can connect, so we used these wonderful paintings by Jacob Lawrence — “The Migration Series” — to illustrate. One of my goals here was to use fine art by African American artists, which you don't really see in a documentary. We kept cutting to those paintings by artists to explain what was going on in a beautiful way.

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