Ending an 87-year drought, in 2017 the Academy finally nominated its first African-American cinematographer, Bradford Young, for his dark, richly textured work on Denis Villeneuve’s science-fiction hit “Arrival.” (Linus Sangren picked up the award for “La La Land”).
Young had already picked awards twice at Sundance for his lensing on Dee Rees’ “Pariah” and shooting Andrew Dosunmu’s “Mother of George” and David Lowery’s “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints” the same year, and he served as Ava DuVernay’s cinematographer on “Middle of Nowhere” and “Selma.” Young spoke with Variety from London, where he is currently filming a little project unofficially known as “Han Solo,” a new chapter in the “Star Wars” franchise.
Personally and historically, what does this nomination mean to you?
It’s a tough question that I’ve been thinking about a lot. It’s always an honor when your peers recognize the hard work you put into the films that we make, so that part of it is an honor. The historical part of it, though, I still haven’t really wrapped my mind around. I still have a lot of questions about why I am the “first” African-American to be nominated for a cinematography award. In some ways, it’s deeply troubling to me, so I find it hard to be so celebratory about it. But just in terms of your peers saying to you that your hard work is being recognized… that part of it, for me, means a lot.
Do you think there are specific obstacles for African-Americans in cinematography?
Yeah. I just think that our work goes massively overlooked because most of our work doesn’t adhere to conventional photographic technique and knowledge. And so our frames that have deep, rich intention generally are considered “underexposed” or “technically insufficient.”
You take someone like Ernest Dickerson. It’s a crime that he wasn’t nominated for a film like “Malcolm X,” or Arthur Jafa wasn’t nominated for a film like “Daughters of the Dust,” or Malik Sayeed wasn’t nominated for a film like “Clockers.” Twenty years later, you find a new generation of filmmakers who are using those films as referential landscapes. Some of the work that’s nominated this year, “Clockers” was a big reference for those films. I think the downside is that it took our country seven generations to recognize what black technicians and black cinematographers bring to the table.
It’s sort of shameful that we can’t celebrate in our moment. I think it takes a real decolonizing of the mind. We have to decolonize the conventional knowledge to the point where works by a cinematographer of color, work that is directed by directors of color, material that is written by people of color—when those things come together, you see great work. But I think it’s going to take some time for us to be in a place where [black] technicians are recognized for what they bring to the table. Especially cinematographers, who, in general, I think consider themselves artists.
It’s a journey, because we don’t go to traditional American film schools. We don’t enter into the traditional route. So I think we, in general, socially, are forgotten, so if we don’t come out of those institutions that are considered those that generate good, conventional cinematographers, we’re sort of just lost. That’s the tragedy of it. For me, I just sort of slipped through the cracks, but there were so many before me who should’ve been honored, should’ve been recognized. That’s the part I’m wrestling with, to try to unpack.
Those three cinematographers you mentioned all went to Howard University, as did you. I’m not an expert in cinematography, but to my eye, the common visual link is hyper-saturated color. Do you think that’s an accurate way to describe their work? How would you describe the commonality between those three men, your work, and the Howard school of cinematography in general?
At Howard, you spend upwards of four—sometimes longer; ten years—studying ways of exposing black skin. And so it’s just like anything else: If you’re in the workshop for that long, you’re going to have a lot to say just because of the rigor and the time spent and the hours spent exploring those ideas. I think what we discover in our work—and from being exposed to African filmmakers, to third-world filmmakers—is our hue is a reflection of every color of the rainbow.
Our job is to sort of extract that hue from skin tone. It’s a beautiful opportunity for us to find this deep, rich nature of our skin tone by operating in the shadows. I think what you find in films like “Belly” or “Clockers” or “Mo’ Better Blues,” “Malcolm X,” “Daughters of the Dust” is that we’re exploring how color resonates deep in black skin tone. It’s all there. You just have to figure out a way to pull it out.
Again, if you’re in the workshop for 20 years and that’s all you’re doing, you’re going to find a sweet spot that’s uniquely yours. It’s not like Malik or A.J. or I all have similar sort of styles. We all have different voices because we come from different places in the world. We have our own experience, but I think the common link is that we understand that, within the spectrum of black skin tones, there’s an infinite array of skin colors you can extract from it, and we develop our own unique photographic techniques to bring that to the surface.
And it’s a challenge to convention. For us, that’s all we know, so it’s just a practice that we continue to engage with. It’s something that we continue to wrestle with and make better, as any artist would.
Read more at Variety