BYWAYS. Photographs by Roger A Deakins

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Roger has always thought about doing it – and he had finally has! He is publishing a book of his still photography. He has rarely shown his still work. That scene features some of the most expressive light in the film, conveying Hilary’s dark emotional state and raging paranoia.

Her work has also appeared in places like Certified Forgotten and Blossom Mag, as well as on podcasts like Casterly Talk, and her own show, Does It Get the Pass?, where she dissects the history and common tropes of the romantic comedy with her co-host and fellow writer, Rebecca Radillo. I always loved painting since I was very young, but it was not until I was at Bath Academy that I looked to photography to express my thoughts. How did it happen? I suspect my paintings were quite naturalistic, which was out of fashion in the 1960s.” After graduating from college, Deakins spent a year photographing life in rural North Devon in South West England on a commission for the Beaford Arts Centre; these images are gathered here for the first time and attest to a keenly ironic English sensibility, and document a now-vanished postwar Britain. A second suite of images expresses Deakins’s love of the seaside. Traveling for his cinematic work has allowed Deakins to photograph landscapes all over the world; in this third group of images, that same irony remains evident. There are advantages as well as disadvantages,” says Deakins. “The technology itself is not at fault, but how it is used is important. What does one of the world’s most sought-after cinematographers do to relax when he’s not scouting, planning or shooting a movie? He takes still photographs, of course.I’ve taken photographs most of my life. And I thought, “Well, what are you going to do with it?” The book was published by Damiani in Italy, they were very encouraging. But what people take from it, I don’t know. When work dried up in London, I was asked to work in the US. Then the Coens came calling – and my world was transformed a b c d Barrell, Tony (23 August 2006). "Obituary – Roger Deakin". The Independent . Retrieved 25 June 2011. It may sound strange, but I consider my film and my photography work to be completely independent from each other. Certain preferences in composition probably exist across both, but I don’t feel they feed into each other. They’re quite separate disciplines. I’m much more influenced by photographers and painters than film-makers. I study the work of other cinematographers, of course, but there’s something unique about a still image that speaks to me more than any other visual language. In the foreword to the book, you write, ‘The choice of when to take a picture, and which of the resultant images has a future, reveals something of us as individuals. Each of us see differently.’ Do you think someone who knows your film work could see these images and know they were made by you? What are the ‘Deakins-isms’ we might see here?

His first Oscar win, after 13 nominations and losses, was for Blade Runner 2049 and his second was for 1917. He did not win for No Country For Old Men in 2007, perhaps because he competed against himself that year with Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. While not the biggest box office hit of Deakins’s career, the use of vignetting and unusual light sourcing in Jesse James gave the film a warm reception among cinematography enthusiasts. I was going to ask you about your relationship to painting. I know that you’ve always had a love of the medium. Does it influence your work behind the lens? Deakins has still not been able to forget his attraction for the British seaside, despite living for many years in Santa Monica, California. He grew up in Torquay, a seaside town on the southern edge of England. The history and nostalgia of the Victorian and Gregorian structures still linger in his mind.Known for his work with filmmakers like the Coen Brothers and Denis Villeneuve, Deakins has over eighty cinematography credits to his name, and has been inducted into both the American and British Society of Cinematographers. He has been nominated for Academy Awards a whopping fifteen times and won twice, garnering accolades for Best Cinematography for Blade Runner 2049 and 1917.

Do you use the camera to record memories, or is it more of an aesthetic instrument for you, a tool to make art? Camera features] would depend on the project in hand,” he says. “I don’t need many of the additional features that are being built into newer camera systems. That is why I love the Leica M8 or M9 cameras. They are really simple manual cameras.” Most are actually scanned prints. I make quite large prints and just scan them. I found that gave me better quality than scanning the negative. I can see it’s you,” Deakins recalled Villeneuve saying about the book, meaning that the director recognized the eye behind the images.

Still Cameras and Movie (Video) Cameras

It’s for this reason that, as satisfying as the similarities between his films and these pictures are, the differences are just as revealing. Comparing the two bodies of work is an exercise in comparing the essences of film and photography, and an uncommon opportunity at that: rare are the practitioners who are equally accomplished in both formats. Although photography has remained one of Roger’s few hobbies, more often it is an excuse for him to spend hours just walking, his camera over his shoulder, with no particular purpose but to observe. Some of the images in this book, such as those from Rapa Nui, New Zealand and Australia, he took whilst traveling with James. Others are images that caught his eye as walked on a weekend, or catching the last of the light at the end of a day’s filming whilst working on projects in cities such as Berlin or Budapest, on Sicario in New Mexico, Skyfall in Scotland and in England on 1917. But even for a photo he waited literally months to get, of a barren tree leaning over a cliff path, there’s a certain quality of serendipity. The Oscar winner behind films for the Coen brothers and Denis Villeneuve has published five decades’ worth of never-before-seen photos. Music She went from ‘Munch’ to Munchkins in a New York minute. But Ice Spice is just getting started

Roger Deakin (1999). Waterlog: A Swimmer's Journey Through Britain. Chatto and Windus. ISBN 0-7011-6652-5. Although Deakins has published Byways, a collection of his 50 years of street photography , he has no secret sauce on the subject. He also has a podcast called Team Deakins. It's a weekly show he does with his wife James about cinematography, the film business and whatever other questions listeners submit to the show.

Color is a Distraction

I think there’s definitely a sensibility. That’s true even when I work on a film. I’m not the author of the film, obviously—I’m working for a director and with anywhere up to a couple of hundred people—but I do think you stamp your point of view, your taste, on the work you do. When I shoot films, you can see there’s a continuity, that there’s an individual behind the camera. I look at some other people’s work in film and that’s true, too. I could always recognize a film that was shot by Conrad Hall, for instance; there’s a certain sensibility that he had. That’s the case for still photographers as well. The photograph [referenced] was taken one day when I had made my way to Bournemouth and was just walking the promenade. What attracted me to the image was the juxtaposition of the elements in the frame, the older couple with their lunch, the restroom and the sign ‘Keep it to Yourself.’ Looking for Summer, Weston-Super-Mare, 2004 Laing, Olivia (16 November 2008). "Review: Notes From Walnut Tree Farm by Roger Deakin". The Observer– via www.theguardian.com. IndieWire: How do you approach your cinematography work and how does that differ from the approach you take with your personal photography?