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FACES IN THE FRAME An interview with Geoff Boyle
How many cinematogra- phers can claim to have filmed everyone from the Dalai Lama and Margaret Thatcher to Joan Collins? But then few will have the dramat- ic range of experience that Geoff Boyle has accumulated in 35 years. These days he is a busy commercials cameraman and also recently shot the BAFTA award winning short, About A Girl, directed by Brian Percival.
He is a man who clearly loves his work though to hear him describe the path of his varied career you could easily assume that so much of it has been through a series of happy acci- dents. Boyle’stalent,aboveall,has been in seizing the opportunities that arose and learning as much as he could along the way.
An avid stills photographer from the moment he was given a Brownie 127 camera on his eighth birthday, Boyle enrolled at Derby Art School in the 1960s to study graphics and pho- tography, already armed with A levels in maths and physics. Despite the tech- nical background it was always the art of photography that inspired him.
“My heroes were people like Terence Donovan and David Bailey, as well as Cartier-Bresson and Bill Brandt. Brandt absolutely blew me away. The framing of his images absolutely riveted you and is a major influence on the work I do to this day.”
Boyle dropped out of art school before graduation to pursue a full time career. Shooting concert stills he was approached by bands who asked if he knew who could film the on stage performances – providing the perfect opportunity for a sideways career move.
“Then I came across the problem that none of the stuff I shot could be shown on ITV because I hadn’t got a union ticket. The problem was then, back around 1974, that you couldn’t get a job if you didn’t have a ticket and you couldn’t get a ticket if you didn’t have a job.
“So in the end I got a job in the labs for a year and a half, convincing them that photography was just my hobby, that I had no intention of working as a cameraman. Three of us quit the day we got our union cards.
“After that I was really lucky that there was a job going in Oman, where they were setting up a TV station. We shot all kinds of stuff there. But the nice thing there was you were 700 miles away from anything. They stuck this television station in Salalah, which has now got Hiltons and
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EXPOSURE • 10 & 11