Nestor Almendros, Vittorio Storaro, Christopher Doyle, Roger Deakings, Gordon Willis, Gregg Doland… Despite being one of the best photography directors who has given the seventh art, I’m sure very rarely (perhaps never) have heard names. But what would be, for example, Terrence Malick and Alejandro González Iñarritu without Emmanuel Lubezki? What Steven Spielberg without Janusz Kaminski? Yes, by the hand of many directors, as most of the times they come to the same photo directors: Sven Nykvist-Ingmar Bergman, John Alcott-Stanley Kubrick, Robert Richardson – Quentin Tarantino, Robert Yeswatch-Wes Anderson… It is unthinkable to understand the films of these giant directors without that aesthetic and atmosphere of photography. Anyway, you don't have to go that far to talk about the great directors of photography. In the same Basque Country, Javier Agirre (Amama, Loreak, urte berri on AMONA, 80 egunean, Lucio, Aupa Etxebeste..), There are names like Gaizka Bourgeaud (A fall without Berlin, Bertsolari, Kutsidazu bidea Ixabel…), Juantxo Sardon (A piece of cheese, Windows to look inside…) and of course, Flavio Martínez Labiano, Javier Agirresarobe, Juan Ruiz Anchía and Kiko de la La.

With more or less poetic terms, we would say that its overall function is to draw the director's dreams through light. Achieve a concrete aesthetic of the whole work and maintain the quality of the image. But also coordinate all your work team for the commissioning of the camera, the focus manager, the attendees and the electrics, taking into account that each one has its strict role. Thanks to all the work done in the pre-production process, the director of photography knows in advance the aesthetics he wants to achieve, combines the lenses and objectives, the format, the support, the height of the camera, the movements, the concrete positions and many more, giving a precise function to each member of the group. However, in recent years, with the arrival of digital cameras, other functions that they already had have been replaced. When recording, for example, instead of worrying about the treatment of celluloid and development, it is recorded directly on a hard drive. Well, in a perfect world that would happen, but on many occasions the reality is very different. Lack of money or scarcity of resources is often driven by what is called “guerrilla filming.” The editing works are done and run the same as the camera has in its hands, “without any problems”.

In addition, the role of photo directors is changing according to the process in which the film is found. It is introduced in pre-production, continues in filming and ends in the post-production phase. It is present in the technical locations, in the analysis and visual structuring of the script, in all the decisions to be made in the aforementioned recording process, as well as in the process of mounting the film, giving the final touches to the light/color to give it a “round” look. In the “timing” process, it corrects the small defects that can be produced in filming, in order to achieve maximum photographic continuity. But the important thing, the main goal, is that all of those images generate emotions and sensations in the viewer. Find an emotional and dramatic effect using different filters, objectives and illuminations. And above all, go hand in hand with what the script and the story require.

Some will say that they are mere technicians within the work team of a production. But the others, the artists, the magicians of the image. I think they have a little bit of the two. It is clear that they are an essential gear within the machinery of seventh art. We cannot forget that, although they have followed different paths, photography and film are siblings of the same mother, born from the same root.