BYWAYS. Photographs by Roger A Deakins

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There are advantages as well as disadvantages,” says Deakins. “The technology itself is not at fault, but how it is used is important. 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. They are very different ways of seeing,” he clarifies. “My still photographs are my personal sketches that either stand or fall on their own. What I do as a cinematographer is so very different.” The B&W Photographs Not very big—I don’t really keep much, you see. I mean, I take a lot of photographs when I’m working on a movie, but they’re just a reference for the film. The photographs that I take for my own pleasure are quite few, really. I don’t have the time when I’m working, and thankfully I’ve had quite a productive career.

IndieWire: How do you approach your cinematography work and how does that differ from the approach you take with your personal photography? The relationship between film and photography is something I think about often. It’s a question I’ve asked many photographers in interviews like this one: ‘How has film informed your pictures?’ Every time, without fail, they play it down. 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 EnglandOriginally I wanted to be a painter, a bohemian! [Laughs] Then, while I was at art college, I discovered photography. My paintings were fairly naturalistic, just based on things that I’d seen, so it made sense to have a camera and photograph the things I saw. A great photographer, Roger Mayne, was teaching at the school; he would come in for a few days every now and again. He was quite an inspiration, him and his work. So I thought I would become a photographer. But 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. I had always been interested in film, especially documentary filmmaking, and so it seemed like that might be a great opportunity. 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.” 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 spoke to IndieWire about his photography in an interview published below, lightly edited for length and clarity.

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.” 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.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 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. Roger Deakin (1999). Waterlog: A Swimmer's Journey Through Britain. Chatto and Windus. ISBN 0-7011-6652-5.

Color can be pleasing and vibrant and be about nothing but itself. It can complicate an image, and I am always striving for simplicity. 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. Pop Culture Legendary Cinematographer Roger Deakins on Getting Rejected from Film School and Releasing His First Book of Photographs at 72Do you use the camera to record memories, or is it more of an aesthetic instrument for you, a tool to make art? 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. 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).