One of the world’s most accomplished cinematographers, Haskell Wexler, who has died aged 93, was nominated five times for an Academy Award, and won for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) and Bound for Glory (1976). Wexler worked equally on mainstream and independent films, fiction and documentaries, monochrome and colour. Yet, rare in cinematographers, most of whom are hired hands, he created a relatively homogeneous filmography and never swerved from his radical convictions.
These were instilled in him from an early age. Son of Simon and Lottie Wexler, he was born into a wealthy liberal Jewish family in Chicago, who sent him to the progressive Francis Parker school, where his best friend was Barney Rosset, who later became the owner of the iconoclastic Grove Press. At the age of 12, while he and his family were on holiday in Italy, Haskell used a 16mm Bell & Howell camera to film uniformed fascist youths, which he later intercut with home movies of his two brothers and parents.
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