Welcome to the Sir Roger Deakins Photography Exhibition. Our exhibition of Sir Roger Deakins’ photography work will include not only curated selections from Byways but also a collection of his unpublished work.
Byways is the product of Deakins’ fascination with photography. He said in an interview with A Rabbit’s Foot, “I was unhappy [at art school] until I started taking photographs… I think it must have been a really cheap camera—a Praktica. The lens was plastic. But it did what I needed it to do, and helped me discover what I wanted to concentrate on—which would then become cinematography. I spend a lot of my time trying to take street photographs, and with that you need to spend a lot of time just wandering around until something catches your eye.”
The world has changed a lot in the years since 1971, when the earliest of Byways’ photos were taken. Yet the overarching sense of these stills is one that points to the immediacy of the temporal moment. Deakins’ photos snatch the transient out of the air and lay it out on the page in black and white, allowing a bittersweet meditation on that which is most intimate and fleeting–the present.
“I think anything you do informs the way you relate to what’s in front of you at that moment,” says Deakins. “It’s like going to a museum and seeing an artist you weren’t aware of. It all takes an influence on you; like seeing the sunrise on a morning walk. It all has an effect somewhere, but I never consciously think of anything I do. You have to work instinctively. Find a spontaneous reaction.”
