There’s no currently working cinematographer as accomplished or popular as Roger Deakins, a minor celebrity in his own right for his high-profile collaborations with the Coen brothers, Denis Villeneuve, and Sam Mendes. He’s been keeping busy as of late with his shop-talk podcast, and today brings the news that he’ll expand into the world of print media as well with his next venture.
The Deakins Archives Twitter account has announced that Italian art book publisher Damiani will partner with Deakins on a new monograph titled ‘Byways’, collecting 50 years of still photography work from the moving-picture master. The upcoming release will hit the UK come August, and then US markets later in the fall.
Over five decades of jobs and life, Deakins has amassed a staggering backlog of both casual snapshots and carefully composed artworks, dating back to his post-graduate years. The publisher’s included description gets into finer detail on the trajectory of Deakins’ career, divided into phases organized around a common theme:
“After graduating from college Deakins spent a year photographing life in rural North Devon, in Southwest 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, while also documenting a vanished postwar Britain. A second suite of images expresses Deakins’ 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.”
Devotees of Deakins may be somewhat disappointed to find that the book doesn’t include so much behind-the-scenes tidbits from the notable film sets he’s worked on, erring more on the side of original independent work. All the same, it provides an intimate view through the eye of a peerless image constructor, showing us how he sees the world in his inimitable way.
Published 6 Jul 2021
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