Low point: “Being fired from a movie set. But thankfully there have been far more highs than lows.”

Shows & Exhibitions In Pictures: See the Highly Ambitious, Two-City Jasper Johns Retrospective at the Whitney and the Philadelphia Museum of Art Deakins studied photography at an art college in Bath (west of London, England) but does not necessarily apply the rules of photography to his filmmaking. Although Deakins has published Byways, a collection of his 50 years of street photography , he has no secret sauce on the subject.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? James [his wife] and I really didn’t want to do anything that was about movies. That’s why it was hard to get it published. They wanted that book, they wanted a behind-the-scenes book. This is not that. This is something that was very personal to me — it’s like my sketchbook. 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. 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. 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.

Roger Deakins got his start as a director of photography in 1977 on the pulpy British drama Cruel Passion. He's since gone on to collaborate with John Sayles, David Mamet, Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard, Sam Mendes, Denis Villeneuve, and possibly most famously, Joel and Ethan Coen. Roger Deakins helped shoot over half of the Coen Brothers filmography so far, including Fargo and O Brother, Where Art Thou and No Country for Old Men. Deakins tells The Guardian,“I returned to it [the scene at the seaside in 2004] throughout the day and took variations of this shot, but none were as strong. I didn’t speak to the woman here – I rarely make conversation when I’m taking photographs – but she gave me a kind of wordless nod after looking at me and wondering what on earth I was doing. 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. You can create an image in any way you want,” he says. “The subject and the framing are more important than the means of capture.”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. 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 There are advantages as well as disadvantages,” says Deakins. “The technology itself is not at fault, but how it is used is important. 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. 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.

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.” 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.” a b c d Barrell, Tony (23 August 2006). "Obituary – Roger Deakin". The Independent . Retrieved 25 June 2011.

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. 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.” 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.” Join author and Oscar-winning cinematographer Sir Roger A. Deakins for a signing of his new book, Byways. My work as a cinematographer is a collaborative experience and, at least when a film is successful, the results are seen by a wide audience. On the other hand, I have rarely shared my personal photographs and never as a collection.” – Roger A Deakins

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 has also used the Nikon F3 and the Leica M6, which PetaPixel selected as one of “the Best 35mm Film Cameras of All Time.” He owns two Leica M9 cameras, one of which is monochrome and his favorite camera. 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. 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 was one of those rare people whose character and passion is to be found in everything he made, collected, drew or wrote. His notes, written to himself, provide an insight into a beautiful mind and a sweet man. This archive will capture what it was like to be a passionate, engaged, subversive country intellectual living through a time of profound change. It is very appropriate that Roger's papers will remain within his beloved East Anglia. [2] Work [ edit ]