Join author and Oscar-winning cinematographer Sir Roger A. Deakins for a signing of his new book, Byways. The DP had initially been interested in documentary photography, so he worked on the same genre of documentaries as a budding cinematographer. Some directors asked him to work on fiction films and he gladly obliged. When no more work was found in London, he landed a movie in the US. Next, he was approached by the Coen Brothers ( Fargo, The Big Lebowski, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, No Country for Old Men), and the rest, as they say, is history. Recruiting Booth, Devon County Show, Whipton, 1972

There are advantages as well as disadvantages,” says Deakins. “The technology itself is not at fault, but how it is used is important. No specifics have been given about the photography included in Byways, but according to Distributed Art Publishers, the book’s American distributor, it will gather three suites of images together, chronicling the change in Deakins’ photographic style over time: 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. As a cinematographer, Deakins looms large: he is, for many movie peoples’ money, the greatest person doing the job today (witness his 15 Oscar nominations, and two wins). But his reputation as a fine-art photographer is far less developed. Not only is Byways his first monograph, it’s also the first place many of these pictures have ever been shared publicly. Personally, I like showing a director what I am thinking and what the image looks like rather than waiting for any comments they might have in the dailies screening room the next day.” [The reference here is to the monitors where the director can see what the cinematographer is capturing in real time.] The Rail to Grants, New Mexico, 2014 Reading her Sunday paper, Preston, 2003 The Beginnings in England

I used to hitchhike to various locations and spend the day with my camera,” recounts the cinematographer of the twenty-third Bond film, Skyfall.“Sometimes, I even slept on the beach to catch the early light. 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. 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? At his exhibition at the Peter Fetterman Gallery in Santa Monica, he says of that print, “I remember when my brother took me to the fairground where I grew up in Torquay; you could go in and join the boxing — they would call for somebody in the audience to come up and attempt to outbox their main guy. There was a bearded lady, there was the sheep with the two heads and strip shows.”

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. The filmmakers worked to make the cinema that is the main setting of “Empire” “an inviting place, as opposed to the exterior. That’s exactly what Sam said when we were first talking about the script: that it’s important that it felt warm and a refuge for Hilary. That’s where her friends were. And he talked about it becoming even warmer as the film progresses.” Deakins remembers taking his first photograph in 1969 in Bournemouth, England. A man and a woman are eating lunch on a bench outside a ladies’ room with a sign that says, “Keep it to Yourself.” In the foreword to his Byways book, Deakins questions, “Whether without a detailed explanation of how and why a picture came about, can it mean the same to the viewer as it does to the photographer?These are just photographs from here, there, and everywhere. There’s not really any structure to the book. There’s no rhyme or reason to it, other than the fact that they’re all shots that I like. Some people had asked, ‘Well, why don’t you do a book?’ And eventually I just thought, ‘Yeah, why not?’ Deakins’ other current project is the latest in his long collaboration with Mendes, “Empire of Light.” The film draws from events and people in Mendes’ life and represents his only solo writing credit to date (his only other screenplay shared with Krysty Wilson-Cairns for “ 1917,” for which Deakins won his second Oscar). Roger Deakin (1999). Waterlog: A Swimmer's Journey Through Britain. Chatto and Windus. ISBN 0-7011-6652-5. I confess to feeling something like jealousy reading the record of Deakin’s wonderful, friend-filled existence, at once liberated and rooted. A boomer, he grew up in a postwar era of optimism and economic prosperity, a working-class scholarship boy at Haberdashers’ Aske’s (“we knew how to use the apostrophe”) who went on to a dreamlike Cambridge of punting and Pimm’s. He became a successful advertising executive, was pursued by any number of girls, then found a ruined farmhouse in Suffolk to which, aged 31, he retired. He then teaches, swims, gets involved in the local “faires”, which are like mini East Anglian Glastonburys, befriends Richard Branson and Andrea Arnold, Richard Mabey and Robert Macfarlane. He’s a terrible poet but a beautiful writer of prose, and records his life as if he knows that a book like this will one day be written about it. Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario was shot in New Mexico. At the end of the shooting day, Deakins would take off with his trusted still camera looking for the last traces of light. Sometimes he would drive to the same location and wait for late-day thunderstorms to produce the shot he visualized like the lightning bolt.

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. Photography provides me with a release: the freedom to capture whatever speaks to me. I’ve spent much of my career working on film sets shooting movies. I love how collaborative that process is, even if it’s sometimes stressful and demanding. But no decision is ever truly your own there. Photography is completely different: it’s just me and my camera. I’m the one making calls. Deakin first worked in advertising as a copywriter and creative director for Colman Prentis and Varley, while living in Bayswater, London. He was responsible for the National Coal Board slogan "Come home to a real fire". Following this, he taught French and English at Diss Grammar School for three years. [1] [3] Many images in his photographic oeuvre have harsh lighting, and Deakins also uses it in his cinematography, but it is finely controlled. In his latest film Empire of Light, there is a scene when harsh lighting is required to show a character’s raging paranoia.

The Beginnings in England

The Joy of Flight is a very simple photograph,” says the Englishman. “It is easily read, and I think it works as a small image.” [Referring to Magnum Photos using it for their last print sale.] Lightning Strikes, New Mexico, 2014

That you don’t really see the joins in the enterprise is credit to Barkham’s skill as a writer, but also as an organiser of content. The story here is largely chronological, but the way it is told, the movement between the jagged present tense of the journals, the more meditative reflectiveness of the notebooks written late in life and the wistful reminiscences of friends lends the whole endeavour a sense of multidimensional dynamism. I don’t like the word ‘art,’ really. [Laughs] I’ve obviously been on holiday and taken snapshots of a memory, but the photographs that are in the book, they just grabbed my attention. I liked the frame or I liked the light. Often I liked the slightly surreal quality of the image, a juxtaposition of things in the frame. It’s not art; I’m not a photographer and they’re not memory aids. I don’t sketch with a pencil. I sketch through the camera, I suppose.After I discovered a love for a photographic image, it seemed natural to explore whether documentary filmmaking might be another avenue of exploration,” remembers Deakins. “Only when The National Film and Television School opened up, did I see an opportunity in that direction.” That scene features some of the most expressive light in the film, conveying Hilary’s dark emotional state and raging paranoia. Deakin was a founder director of the arts and environmental charity Common Ground in 1982. Among his environmental causes, he worked to preserve woodland, ancient rights of way and coppicing techniques of Suffolk hedgerows. [3] Bibliography [ edit ]