Barry Ackroyd

Barry Ackroyd is a cinematographer, most known for collaborating with filmmaker and fellow Brit Ken Loach. Ackroyd began shooting initially for television. His third project, a 1989 documentary for TV called "A View from the Woodpile," was his first collaboration with Loach, and from there the two have gone on to work on numerous films together, among them the comedy "Riff-Raff" in 1991, the romantic drama "My Name is Joe" in 1998, and the crime drama "Sweet Sixteen" in 2002. Loach is known as a fiercely independent director, resisting the bigger budgets and flash of Hollywood, and focusing on working-class people as subjects, and so Ackroyd's photography tends much more toward verisimilitude than spectacle. In 2006, Ackroyd teamed up with Paul Greengrass to shoot the challenging historical drama "United 93," about the hijacked 9/11 plane that crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. Then in 2008, he worked with director Kathryn Bigelow on her much-lauded, bomb-squad-in-Iraq action-thriller, "The Hurt Locker," which, in addition to earning Best Picture and Best Director Oscars, also earned Ackroyd a cinematography nomination. In 2011, he would team up with Bigelow again on the TV drama "The Miraculous Year."