As a teenager growing up in Oldham, Lancashire, Barry Ackroyd saw Ken Loach's Kes (1969) on its original release and recognised its characters as kindred spirits. Twenty years later, he became Loach's regular cinematographer, his documentary background having given him a keen instinct for obtaining the perfect image even in situations where actors have been encouraged to improvise and ignore their marks. His distinctive brand of grainy, naturally-lit, often hand-held realism has become increasingly influential, garnering him an Oscar nomination and a BAFTA for The Hurt Locker (US, 2008), in which his stylistic signature was at least as visible as that of its director Kathryn Bigelow.
Encouraged by his art teacher, Ackroyd originally intended to become a sculptor, but discovered 16mm film while studying fine art at Portsmouth Polytechnic. To this day he often favours 16mm's more obtrusive grain, because his training taught him to be acutely aware of the tactility of objects, a concept that applies as much to the surface of celluloid (and the way light reacts to it) as it does to a physical object.
Ackroyd spent the 1980s in television, mainly on documentaries, in which capacity he first worked with Ken Loach on The View from the Woodpile (Channel 4, tx. 12/6/1989) and the Northern Ireland polemic Time to Go (BBC, tx. 9/5/1989). From the building-site comedy Riff-Raff (1991) to Looking for Eric (France/UK, 2009), Ackroyd would shoot virtually all of Loach's fiction features and many of his documentaries. Their intuitive rapport was recognised by a special 'Best Duo' award at the 2002 Camerimage Film Festival and a European Film Award for Ackroyd's contribution to The Wind that Shakes the Barley (UK/Eire/Germany, 2006).
Alongside fiction projects for Carine Adler, Steven Poliakoff, Dominic Savage and others, Ackroyd continued to shoot documentaries, notably with Nick Broomfield, who appreciated his ability to react quickly to deliberately-engineered confrontations with the late South African neo-Nazi leader Eugene Terre'blanche, the subject of The Leader, His Driver and the Driver's Wife (Channel 4, tx. 4/4/1991). Ackroyd would subsequently shoot Broomfield's Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer (1992) and Tracking Down Maggie (Channel 4, tx. 19/5/1994).
He collaborated twice with the writer-director pairing of Jimmy McGovern and Charles McDougall on the drama-documentaries recreating the 1989 Hillsborough stadium disaster (Hillsborough, ITV, tx. 5/12/1996) and the 1972 Bloody Sunday killings in Northern Ireland (Sunday, Channel 4, tx. 28/1/2002). These led to journalist-turned-director Paul Greengrass hiring him to shoot the September 11 hijacking reconstruction United 93 (France/UK/US, 2006) and the War on Terror-inspired Green Zone (France/US/UK, 2010). For the latter, Ackroyd met the challenge of filming a 20-minute large-scale action scene in almost pitch darkness.
The near-simultaneous release of United 93 and The Wind that Shakes the Barley brought Ackroyd to Kathryn Bigelow's attention. Rejecting conventional dramatic blocking, Ackroyd approached her tense Iraq bomb-disposal drama The Hurt Locker as if it were a documentary, using the same 16mm equipment with which he had shot his early television work and operating one of the four cameras himself.
Michael Brooke