BYWAYS. Photographs by Roger A Deakins

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Some photos in the book are purely there because they stand in for a part of my life shooting documentaries, like the round-the-world yacht race. Roger A Deakins (born 1949 in Torquay, UK) is one of today's most honored cinematographers, renowned for his vast and varied body of work. Byways is the first monograph by the legendary cinematographer, best known for his collaborations with directors such as the Coen brothers, Sam Mendes, and Denis Villeneuve.

But throughout the process, you only ever see the flaws, and you’re also aware of the things you didn’t do. Speaking to Chris Cotonou, Sir Roger Deakins shares his thoughts on the correlation of film and still photography, and selects a few of his favourite images from Byways. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. So that was interesting going back to those photographs, and then selecting ones that might not be for the archive where they are and they might not be the first choices because they don’t show a village square or they’re little moments, but they are things that I’m attracted to, so it was nice to rediscover those and let them live on the page. His countless career accolades also include two Independent Spirit Awards, numerous Critic’s Awards, and the Career Achievement Award from the National Board of Review.

I love wandering around with my camera because I feel there’s no pressure for me to produce anything. I went back and forth the whole day, and I photographed a couple of different people in the bus stop, and this lady was there with the umbrella. We’ve all had that tremendous, visceral feeling of sitting in a theater, watching a movie, and it’s just so damn beautiful – and I don’t mean pretty – we cannot breathe.

It was a matter of circumstance—and free time in his demanding schedule—that led to the publishing of Byways, a monograph that compiles his black and white images from as early as 1971. The great photographers have dedicated their lives to taking still images and I’m not known for that, so for a publisher, I think it was a step in the dark. Others are images that caught his eye as walked on a weekend, or catching the last of the light at the end of a day’s filming whilst working on projects in cities such as Berlin or Budapest, on Sicario in New Mexico, Skyfall in Scotland and in England on 1917. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. After page 145, instead of having the last 14 pages, my copy has reprinted pages 18-31 mixed with 145-159.This is the first monograph by the legendary Oscar-winning cinematographer Sir Roger Deakins, best known for his collaborations with directors such as the Coen brothers, Sam Mendes and Denis Villeneuve. The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network. He is in his own words a private person, for whom photography is, “an excuse to spend many hours just walking’ with “no specific purpose but to observe”. I'd recommend picking up the book if you're a fan of Roger Deakins' cinematography work and are interested to see this other side. Byways is filled with purely black-and-white imagery – a medium Deakins finds powerful and enjoys working in, partly due to the work of the black-and-white photographers Deakins admired when growing up.

One of his first jobs was as a still photographer for the Beaford Arts Centre in North Devon, England. I like that image because it makes you wonder what the lady’s thinking about whilst looking at the photograph. Two-time Oscar-winning cinematographer Roger Deakins is best known for his effective and simple camera work on films such as “Skyfall,” “Blade Runner 2049” and “1917,” on which he collaborated with directors such as Sam Mendes and Denis Villeneuve. You see it in the bus stop photo, juxtaposing different images with the young girl in the poster and the harshness of the bus stop. There is, however, a keen sense of light and line and how a scene can go beyond its simple components to become resonant.Given the opportunity to see some of his personal work, not under the direction of others is not an opportunity I'll easily pass up. Byways' includes previously unpublished black-and-white photographs spanning five decades, from 1971 to the present. His British colleagues have honored him with 11 nominations and seven wins at British Society of Cinematographers events. 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.

Other Oscar nominations: Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners; the Coen brothers’ Fargo; Martin Scorsese’s Kundun; Stephen Daldry’s The Reader; Sam Mendes’ Skyfall and Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken, to name a few. At the time, Roger Mayne, the renowned British social documentary photographer, (best known for his depictions of London’s Southam street during the 1950s) was a guest lecturer at the college, and it was he, who galvanized Deakins’ curiosity. Byways’ is the first monograph by the legendary Oscar-winning cinematographer Sir Roger A Deakins, best known for his collaborations with directors such as the Coen brothers, Sam Mendes and Denis Villeneuve.Byways" is the first monograph on the photographic work of iconic Oscar-winning cinematographer Sir Roger A. I started laughing after a while, because not only is it one of the worst formatted books I’ve ever come across (*most of the pix are in landscape mode, yet the book is presented in portrait mode? It contains Roger's still photography over the years from various places, with a strong focus on his early life in the southwest of England. Byways started as something specific and became more about things I have observed throughout my life. Deakins has been admitted to both the British Society of Cinematographers and to the American Society of Cinematographers.