The Oscar-winning film-maker’s image, shot on a vintage train in Germany, features in a new book of his off-duty documentary photography
Long before he was a cinematographer, Roger Deakins was a photographer. The film-maker’s eye that has earned Deakins 15 Oscar nominations (and two Oscars) in celebrated work with the Coen brothers, Sam Mendes and others first found its expression in documentary photography of rural north Devon in the early 1970s.
Some of those formative pictures of farm hands and country fairs are collected in the first monograph of Deakin’s photography work. They take their place alongside images such as this one, which was taken on the set of The Reader, the film of Bernhard Schlink’s Holocaust novel, made in Germany in 2007. Although Deakins says he often used a still camera to take photographs of locations or to plan lighting rigs for particular scenes, occasionally, off duty and off set, he returned to his first vocation, just looking for little moments that captured his attention.