![]() I can look at the colour work of Alex Webb for hours and wonder how he got those shots. Their ability to capture so much in a single moment, so much within a single image, is something that is a real talent and shows their true connectivity with a subject. Larry Burrows, Don McCullin and, more recently, James Nachtwey and Alex Webb stand out for me but there are obviously so many more. I admire a great many photojournalists and since having shot documentaries in some difficult parts of the world I can really appreciate the work they do. I think any style I have has just developed from there. I have always loved stills photography and I worked in documentary film-making for a number of years. I don’t think I took any particular ‘action’ to develop a style. Sound recordist Noel Smart and I spent nine months on that trip and to say it had some ‘interesting’ moments would put it mildly. I was brought up by the sea in Devon and I guess that was enough of a resume. I had hardly any experience of yachts before then but I convinced a producer at a television company that I was the right choice to shoot a documentary about life aboard one of the yachts. The biggest risk I ever took was probably to volunteer as a crew member on the Whitbread Around the World Yacht Race of 1977-8. The time I spent there allowed to me to gain confidence and to experiment. ![]() My experience at the National Film School had, probably, the biggest effect on my development as a cinematographer. I always loved painting and especially the work of Georgio de Chirico and Edvard Munch, but I would say that I was basically self-taught. At art college I was lucky to meet Roger Mayne, who was a tutor for a while, and grew to admire the quiet way he worked as a street photographer. Photography and photojournalism had quite an influence on me as it did on everyone in the late 60s. ![]() I was influenced by the films I saw when I was a teenager, films such as Culloden and War Game by Peter Watkins, films by Antonioni and Visconti, Mizoguchi, Resnais, Breton, Melville and Tarkovsky. ![]()
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