JEFF HUTCHENS INTERVIEW
IT’S ABOUT LOOKING AT THINGS ON THE further edges of human experience ”
was pretty fun and creatively exciting,” he adds. That Hutchens enjoys experimenting with the visual language of documentary is unsurprising given his background. True crime might loom large on his CV, but it’s only a small part of a career that began in photojournalism and has taken him to more than 80 countries. He grew up nomadic (his parents worked for the US State Department) and studied psychology and pre-med at college before realising that he was spending most of his free time taking photographs. After internships at newspapers, he worked as a staff photojournalist, while he and his brother (also a cinematographer) began cold-calling National Geographic with documentary ideas. The dogged persistence paid off: he was eventually offered a staff photography position at the National Geographic Channel, where he spent two years travelling solo, shooting, producing and editing projects for its image library. This dream job took him from Alaska to Namibia, Central Africa and Southeast Asia before he went freelance in 2005, shooting for publications including Time and The New York Times Magazine . He moved into cinematography around 2011, but says his background in
INTO THE DARK Hutchens worked in photojournalism before pivoting to documentaries such as Confessions with a Killer (above) and Hitler and the Nazis: Evil on Trial (top right, top left)
stills photography gave him an amazing grounding for his work as a DOP. “I think it’s an incredible training ground for cinematography because you’re used to having to create compositions that stand alone without motion, without sound, without all the other elements that you have to work with as a cinematographer,” he explains. “If you can create images that are arresting enough as stills, and you bring that aesthetic into film, I think it works incredibly well.”
While he still loves documentary, he is increasingly interested in pushing into narrative work, recently DOPing and co- directing a minimalist black & white film starring David Strathairn. But whatever the subject or format, he says, “I love this beautiful mix of technical and political and creative. It makes you fire on all cylinders. You’re always problem-solving, dealing with logistics, figuring out how can I take this situation that is actually part of the world and elevate it into something transcendent?”
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