1/4/2024 0 Comments Roger deakins byways![]() ![]() Speaking of his first monograph as a project reflecting “a different side” of his life, Deakins says he hopes “people will genuinely enjoy the images, regardless of who took them or why”. As for the irony permeating his visual craft, the cinematographer recounts being drawn to situations that pose questions he can’t seem to find an answer to - “why is there a statue of Michelangelo’s David in a Dartmouth alleyway? - hence sparking his imagination. “I love images both for what they can make me feel and the stories they can tell,” he says. ![]() Whether of the seaside and rural landscapes of Deakins’ English childhood or depicting the compelling views he encountered on his travels around the globe, the photographs contained in BYWAYS speak of a world filled with unexpected contradictions and his desire to immortalise them. Courtesy of the artist and Damiani Editore. Elaborating on the context in which the photographs featured in the volume were shot, he adds that still photography is something he pursues on the rare occasions when he has only himself “to answer to regarding both the choice of an image and the moment at which this one is taken”. “I have always loved the process of interpreting what is around me in an image,” he says, explaining how, as a child and teenager, that brought him to experiment with painting - the first artistic medium he ever tried his hand at. Launched in August 2021, the book, which is Deakins’ first monograph, comprises a collection of images emblematic of the Academy Award winner’s time off feature films. ![]() “We were lucky to find in Damiani a publisher that was both enthusiastic and supportive,” Deakins tells Re-Edition of the publishing house behind BYWAYS: a thorough exploration of his love of still photography, spanning over five decades of artistic activity. Roger Deakins got his start as a director of photography in 1977 on the pulpy British drama Cruel Passion.Legendary, Oscar-winning cinematographer Roger Deakins spent years wondering what to do with his photographs - “why take them if they are never seen?” - until the multiple Covid-induced lockdowns persuaded him to gather them into a book. I say at the beginning of the book that I’m not a photographer, and I’m really not I’ve just taken some pictures. Waterlog, the only book he published in his lifetime, topped the UK best seller charts and founded the wild swimming movement. In 1968, he bought Walnut Tree Farm, a semi-ruined Elizabethan moated, wood-beamed farmhouse on the edge of Mellis Common in Suffolk, near Diss, which he rebuilt and developed over many years and where he lived until his death. Walnut Tree Farm and its surroundings were the subject of two BBC Radio 4 documentaries, The House and The Garden, that he produced.After graduating from college, Roger spent a year photographing life in rural North Devon on a commission for the Beaford Arts Centre these images attest to a keenly ironic English sensibility, and also serve as a record of a time and place of vanished post-war Britain. ![]() Photograph: Roger Deakin archive UEA ‘At once liberated and rooted’: Roger Deakin at his Suffolk farmhouse. At the end of the shooting day, Deakins would take off with his trusted still camera looking for the last traces of light. 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. His British colleagues have honored him with 11 nominations and seven wins at British Society of Cinematographers events.īut then I was talking to a friend who was applying to the National Film School, which was just opening the year that we were finishing at art college. My photography at the time appeared to be leading me towards documentary work, so that’s what I worked on until some directors asked me to be the cinematographer on their fiction films. Images from the book have not yet been released, but if Deakins’ career as a cinematographer is any indication, the work is set to be spectacular. In 2018, he won the Academy Award for best cinematography for Blade Runner 2049, and again more recently for the war drama 1917. ![]()
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