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. Over the course of his career, Deakins’ films have included both documentaries as well as spectacles, but in all of them there is the understanding that composition, the interplay of light and shadow, the way people move through whatever event, holds as much content as dialog and plot. Byways started as something specific and became more about things I have observed throughout my life. His British colleagues have honored him with 11 nominations and seven wins at British Society of Cinematographers events. His career accolades also include two Independent Spirit Awards, numerous critics’ awards, and the Career Achievement Award from the National Board of Review.

There’s a photograph I took of a woman standing at a bus stop in the rain with an umbrella over her.Byways, by Sir Roger A Deakins is a book of black and white still images from the man whose visual imagination and talent have been thrilling us for decades. In the introduction to the book, Deakins says, “I am not a still photographer and I won’t pretend to be one at this stage in my career. Beautifully designed and produced by Bologna's Damiani Editore, it presents one hundred and fifty-five previously unpublished black and white photographs spanning five decades, from 1971 to the present. 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.

For almost a century, American Cinematographer has been the magazine of record for motion-picture professionals all over the world. 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. Throughout the extraordinary cinematographic career that followed, Deakins continued taking photographs as his passion for moving and still images grew. BYWAYS is a new monograph, featuring the still photography of Oscar-winning cinematographer, Roger Deakins.He has also been recognized by his British peers with 11 British Society of Cinematographers (BSC) nominations and 7 wins.

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. The individual images on their pages have no captions or explanation, although there is a list of locations and dates in the back of the book, in an index. 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. An example in Byways Deakins feels demonstrates this perfectly is a photograph he took in 2004 in Weston-super-Mare of an elderly lady at a bus stop in the rain. The photos in the book are all in black and white, what was it about shooting in monochrome that you were attracted to?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. Other Oscar nominations include Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners (2013), the Coen brothers’ Fargo (1996), Martin Scorsese’s Kundun (1997), Stephen Daldry’s The Reader (2008), Sam Mendes’s Skyfall (2012), and Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken (2014). Although there are perhaps one or two, you won't find behind the scenes images in here, if that's what you're looking for. Roger then went on to feature cinematography, starting in England and then later shooting in the United States. With black-and-white images, the viewer looks at the content and the composition of the light more than anything else.