BYWAYS. Photographs by Roger A Deakins

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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.”

My process is pretty straightforward,” Deakins tells PetaPixel.“I enjoy walking and exploring new and also familiar places. Sometimes I see an image that seems to strike me as interesting, but more often, I can spend hours just observing without shooting a single frame. I simply use a still camera to record an image of a location or a set so that I can then use it as a reference,” he says. “These photos … are only spacial references [and not to examine the lighting].” 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] Though many of the frames in “Byways” capture seaside towns such as the one in which “Empire” is located, many of them British, Deakins says he didn’t draw on them for the movie’s visual vocabulary — there’s a bifurcation between the two media for him: “I don’t really connect the film work to my stills work at all. Obviously, I have a sort of sense of composition, but that’s it. [Still photography] is something just much more personal.” Deakins’ first camera was a Praktica film SLR. The digital camera he has used the most is the Leica M8. The movie/video camera he has relied on the most in the last five years is the Arri Alexa LF (sensor slightly larger than full frame).Deakins spoke to IndieWire about his photography in an interview published below, lightly edited for length and clarity.

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. Join author and Oscar-winning cinematographer Sir Roger A. Deakins for a signing of his new book, Byways.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

I don’t know, really. The earliest photographs I took in North Devon, and they’re part of a public archive. But the other images are just things I’ve shot over the years. Some of them were taken in Berlin, for instance. When we were over there working on a movie, I’d go out and explore the city on the weekend. I had my camera and would snap the odd shot. There’s probably three or four in the book from Berlin; maybe I only ever took a dozen total. I don’t take many photographs. It has to be something that grabs me, and then obviously you have to be able to get it at that moment. There are a lot of things that grab your attention but you miss the shot. Deakins says, “The moment where social services come along with the police and bust in the apartment and take her away, I think that was hard for Sam, frankly, because that is something that he lived through a number of times with his mother.” Roger Deakins: People try and relate the two, but I’m not sure they are. Anything you do creating images, it’s about composition and light within the frame. But other than that, I don’t think there’s any connection for me.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 The celebrated director of photography does shoot color photos on his digital cameras but finds that they become more powerful when he converts them to B&W.

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? 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. I can’t say anything is important about street photography,” says the photographer. “Whatever is important to one person may be of no consequence to another. That is what makes the photographic image interesting. We all have a different ‘eye.’ Carnival lights, Hatherleigh, 1971 A Break in the clouds, South Hams, 2015 Deakins (born 1949) has spent much of his career encircled by film sets. He finds working on movies as a cinematographer to be stressful. This demanding environment does not get any better with experience, involving collaboration and coordination with the director, actors, and various crew. Color can be pleasing and vibrant and be about nothing but itself. It can complicate an image, and I am always striving for simplicity.Laing, Olivia (16 November 2008). "Review: Notes From Walnut Tree Farm by Roger Deakin". The Observer– via www.theguardian.com. 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. Despite now spending most of my time in Santa Monica, California, I’ve never quite been able to shake the allure of the British seaside. Perhaps it was growing up in Torquay, but there’s a history to these places that you don’t get in Santa Monica; a sense of nostalgia, of faded Victorian and Georgian glory, that speaks to me so strongly. 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