True Stories With a Lifelong Cinematographer

Most visual artists leave a signature on their endeavors, a revealing "tell" that acts as an immediate way to describe their style. When you think of camerawork in the movies, for instance, there's no mistaking Vittorio Storaro's epic eye behind Bernardo Bertolucci's "The Last Emperor," or Gregg Toland's definitive deep focus in "Citizen Kane."

So go ahead, try to put a finger on Ed Lachman. For the past three decades, the cinematographer has directed photography for Robert Altman, Steven Soderbergh, Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, Paul Schrader, Mira Nair, Sofia Coppola, and other blue-chip directors — his first commercial credit was "The Lords of Flatbush" in 1974 — without ever settling into an aesthetic niche.

"No two films look the same," the director Todd Haynes, who collaborated with Mr. Lachman on the neo-Sirkian "Far From Heaven" (2002) and last year's kaleidoscopic "I'm Not There," said. "And that is very unusual for a DP." Indeed, Mr. Lachman is a bit like Bob Dylan, the chameleonic subject of the latter film, in that he reinvents himself with each new outing.

"Someone once called me a visual gypsy," Mr. Lachman said. He was sitting in his office near Gramercy Park, looking ahead to a retrospective of his films beginning next Friday at the BAMcinématek.

The series supplies ample evidence of the statement, as it slips among documentaries (Mr. Herzog's 1976 film "How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck..." and Mr. Lachman's own latter-day concert film, "Songs for Drella"), quirky, pop-driven features ("Desperately Seeking Susan," David Byrne's "True Stories"), and risky projects that consciously blur any divides (Ulrich Seidl's "Import/Export" and Larry Clark's "Ken Park," which Mr. Lachman co-directed).

"That's what's fun about what I do," he said. "I can look at the world in different ways. It's not about close-up, medium, long shots. You have to find what's unique about a story."

Mr. Lachman, 62, has the wiry look and intensely thoughtful nature of a vintage downtown New Yorker, which he is. A onetime art student and painter, he began making his own short films as a young man, and initially gravitated toward cinematography as a way to train himself. What he had learned about painting translated to moving images.

"Each story has to be told in its own language," he said. "No story is ever the same as the one before or after, and so you try to find those visual references that explain why that story is unique in itself."

Though he's in town for the retrospective, where he'll join colleagues such as Messrs. Schrader, Byrne, and Clark at various screenings, the city is often a mere a stopover on a far-flung global itinerary. During one stretch two years ago, Mr. Lachman found himself wrapping up work with Mr. Seidl on "Import/Export," filming scenes in a warehouse in which young women would titillate anonymous customers by way of video images dispatched over the Internet. Everything was shot on a Super 16 mm camera, with a riveting emphasis on an austere, voyeuristic realism. (The sex factory was real, but the primary character was played by a professional actress.)

"[Seidl] creates a formalism within a reality," Mr. Lachman said. "He never tells the actors exactly what he wants them to do. He's always looking for the happenstance, the things that happen by mistake. Is it the illusion of reality or the reality in the illusion?"

Not long afterward, Mr. Lachman was in Minnesota to lens Meryl Streep and Lindsay Lohan in "A Prairie Home Companion," Altman's final film. The contrast with "Import/Export" was more than just scenario and star power, but it was equally the kind of situation in which his camera thrives.

"What was so compelling about shooting with Altman was he's moving the camera all the time, and there are three cameras," Mr. Lachman said. The jazz-inspired improvisational spirit of Altman's approach synchronized with Mr. Lachman's own ideas. "In a way, the cinematographer is another actor giving a performance. We talk about light and color, but it's also about how the camera moves through a performance. Do the actors motivate the camera? Or does the camera motivate where the actors are?"

Such artful interrogation was part of what bonded Mr. Byrne to the cinematographer during the making of the former Talking Heads front man's 1986 "True Stories," the singer's first and only credit as a feature director.

"I suspect that, like me, Ed might have been a kid from the suburbs who fell in love with all this cool arty stuff out there — it was just wildly exciting," Mr. Byrne said. "His enthusiasm was contagious. I ran into him not too long ago, and we chatted about [the Hungarian director] Béla Tarr. We're both fans, but Ed had just come off working with him. I was impressed and amazed that he survived the experience."

The Cinematography of Ed Lachman runs between May 9 and May 20 at BAMcinématek (30 Lafayette Ave., between Ashland Place and St. Felix Street, Brooklyn, 718-636-4100).