Cinematographers are the eyes for the audience: what they see through their lens determines what we see. Camerawork is the most visible part of film- and TV-making, but the artists responsible for the craft are, to most viewers, invisible. A recent tragedy made Halyna Hutchins, who was accidentally shot and killed on the set of Rust, the face of her profession just as she was ascending in it—revealing some of the dangerous working conditions in film and television today. (This roundtable was conducted before Hutchins’s passing.)
It’s been a male-dominated field for the past century, and a few cinematographers (a.k.a. directors of photography, or, more commonly, DPs) have risen to the top of the ranks: take Gordon Willis, known within the trade as the Prince of Darkness, who shot the shadowy Godfather trilogy; or 15-time Oscar nominee (and two-time winner) Roger Deakins, who has painted beauty in every frame of his films, from The Shawshank Redemption to 1917. Only three years ago, Rachel Morrison became the first female DP to earn an Oscar nomination, for her work on the Netflix film Mudbound.
But that imbalance is slowly shrinking, as the rise of streaming services has blown open the gates for many previously unheard voices (and unseen visions). What’s it like to shoot for both the epic canvas that
