BYWAYS. Photographs by Roger A Deakins

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In Waterlog, Roger Deakin, the late, great nature writer, documents his liquid journey around Britain: an attempt to discover the country afresh by swimming through its seas, rivers, lakes, fens; its swimming pools and secret bathing holes; its canals (even). He writes: "The more I thought about it, the more obsessed I became with the idea of a swimming journey. I started to dream ever more exclusively of water. Swimming and dreaming were becoming indistinguishable. I grew convinced that following water, flowing with it, would be a way of getting under the skin of things, of learning something new." He begins his quest, as he comes to think of it, in the moat of his own old house in Suffolk, breaststroking through a thunderstorm, experiencing a "frog's eye view of rain on the moat" and watching each raindrop as it "exploded in a momentary, bouncing fountain that turned into a bubble and burst". Music She went from ‘Munch’ to Munchkins in a New York minute. But Ice Spice is just getting started With a career that spans four decades, includes 15 Oscar nominations, two wins, and credits on modern classics like “The Shawshank Redemption” and “Blade Runner 2049,” cinematographer Roger Deakins‘ work is some of the most recognizable in the business. But there’s a side of Deakins’ creative output that’s been less visible over his many years in Hollywood: his personal photography.

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. That scene features some of the most expressive light in the film, conveying Hilary’s dark emotional state and raging paranoia. He is survived by his partner Alison Hastie and his son. [1] His archive has been given to the University of East Anglia, including writings on ancient trees, along with film banks, photographs, journals and Deakin's swimming trunks. [2] The nature writer Robert Macfarlane was Deakin's literary executor. He commented:

Deakin married Jenny Hind in 1973 with whom he had a son, Rufus, before the marriage was dissolved in 1982. [1] Deakin died, aged 63, in Mellis, Suffolk. He had been diagnosed with a brain tumour only four months previously.

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: a b c d e "Archives of environmentalist Roger Deakin given to university". Guardian. 8 May 2010 . Retrieved 19 September 2012.

The B&W Photographs

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 The book signing will be held on the Schwartz Mezzanine, outside the David Geffen Theater, on January 29 from 1pm to 3pm.

It may sound strange, but I consider my film and my photography work to be completely independent from each other. Certain preferences in composition probably exist across both, but I don’t feel they feed into each other. They’re quite separate disciplines. I’m much more influenced by photographers and painters than film-makers. I study the work of other cinematographers, of course, but there’s something unique about a still image that speaks to me more than any other visual language. It’s more the instinct of the moment than generally on a movie,” Deakins says. “On movies, you still need to be instinctive and reactive to what actors do and everything else that happens on the day. But these are very much just me walking around.” 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 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. He also has a podcast called Team Deakins. It's a weekly show he does with his wife James about cinematography, the film business and whatever other questions listeners submit to the show. 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. 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. 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

Laing, Olivia (16 November 2008). "Review: Notes From Walnut Tree Farm by Roger Deakin". The Observer– via www.theguardian.com. 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.” I’ve always selected as I’ve gone along over the years. I’ve never really kept a huge number of negatives. I don’t take too many shots. I rarely take a shot unless I’m really confident there’s something there. I’ve been quite selective as I’ve gone along. 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? I am familiar with the ‘ rule of thirds‘, but I have not considered it a conscious part of my approach since I attended art college in the 1960s,” he says.I find color a distraction to the ideas within a frame, though, that said, there are some great photographers who work in color. I just can’t.” Band conductor, Torrington Skateboarding at night, Christchurch, New Zealand, 2003 Although Deakins has published Byways, a collection of his 50 years of street photography , he has no secret sauce on the subject. The one thing that strikes the viewer is that Deakins’ cinematography is in vivid color, but his personal photography is all in B&W. 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 spoke to IndieWire about his photography in an interview published below, lightly edited for length and clarity.