Even still, Roger Deakins has a zeal for photography
LOS ANGELES: What does one of the world’s most sought-ater cinematographers do to relax when he’s not scouting, planning or shooting a movie? He takes still photographs, of course. “It’s just me and my camera. I’m not under stress, under pressure of a schedule or anything,” says two-time Oscar winner and 15-time nominee Roger Deakins. “It’s my excuse to be out there just observing the world. When I was a teenager, I toyed with the idea of becoming a photojournalist, and then I segued into National Film School and documentary filmmaking. But yeah, when I wander around, I take a camera, and it’s just relaxation. I mean, I love images.”
Deakins’ two current projects are as personal as can be — one to him: a book of 50 years’ worth of his black-and-white still photographs, “Byways”; the other to auteur Sam Mendes and his new film, “Empire of Light.” “Byways” captures the world through a largely impromptu eye. As opposed to the painstaking coordination of film sets, these shots are oten off the cuff. “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.”
About the first third of “Byways” is a time capsule of life in a rural town in the early 70s, an assignment Deakins had when working for an art center in northern England. There are men with tractors, people with sheep, dogs with jobs, a determined fellow carrying dried brush on his back who brings to mind the cover of Led Zeppelin’s fourth album. There are shots of an old-fashioned English fairground, the kind Deakins says you don’t find anymore, with kids on spinning rides in front and signs in the back beckoning patrons to “Boxing” or the “Stripteaze.”
At his exhibition at the Peter Feterman 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 atempt to outbox their main guy. There was a bearded lady, there was the sheep with the two heads and strip shows.”
Thephotographersaysthere’snoconscioustheme or sequencing to the rest of the collection, though consideringthetitle,thevarietyoflocales(melbourne, Australia; Budapest, Hungary; Albuquerque, New Mexico; and Romania, among them) and the shots’ unregulated movement through time, it can’t help but feel like a uniquely curated travelogue. Instead of famous landmarks, its souvenirs are moments, some ironic, some intimate. There’s no Eiffel Tower.
Its postcard of Berlin is not the Brandenburg Gate, but an empty playground with holes cut in a wall that form an alarming face, with something that looks like a tank turret in the foreground and smokestacks in the background. The face could be screaming. For an image captured during a storm, Deakins let the shuter click away, hoping for — and miraculously geting — that ideal lightning strike in the desert expanse, this one bisecting the building in the center of the frame (during the filming of Denis Villeneuve’s “Sicario”).
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. “I live about 4 miles [from there], and I jogged that cliff path. I spent a long time looking at that tree and waiting for winter, when it was bare. Sometimes they cut down the bracken and everything; this was one time the tree was opened up. I took quite a few when the tree was exposed like that with different skies, but there’s something about this bland, empty sky and the light hiting the water that makes this much simpler.”
In another image, a sign with “Jolly Roger” on it is in the foreground by a dock; just behind it, a British flag flies. But in the background, much smaller, is the detail Deakins waited for — a girl nearly horizontal on a swing. “The dad was just out of frame ... I loved the idea that she’s in flight and she’s just an element in the whole picture. Some people don’t even notice it, which is a shame.”