Frederick Elmes

Frederick Elmes' body of work as cinematographer includes groundbreaking projects with some of cinema's most original and innovative filmmakers.
He has collaborated three times prior with Jim Jarmusch: on Night on Earth (for which he won an Independent Spirit Award), Coffee and Cigarettes, and the Ten Minutes Older short piece "INT. TRAILER. NIGHT." (starring Chloë Sevigny).
Mr. Elmes' interest in photography began when his father gave him his Leica camera. After studying photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology, his fascination with the medium's possibilities for telling a story led him to pursue graduate film studies at New York University. The offer of a fellowship at the American Film Institute brought him to Los Angeles in 1971, where he began a long-term collaboration with David Lynch.
While at AFI, he photographed Mr. Lynch's Eraserhead (starring Jack Nance), and worked on John Cassavetes' The Killing of a Chinese Bookie and Opening Night.
Mr. Elmes' cinematography of Mr. Lynch's Blue Velvet earned him several accolades, and was cited as the year's best by the National Society of Film Critics. His next film with Mr. Lynch, Wild at Heart, won the top prize (the Palme d'Or) at the Cannes International Film Festival, and brought Mr. Elmes his first Independent Spirit Award.
He has worked twice with Tim Hunter (on River's Edge and The Saint of Fort Washington) and four times with Ang Lee (on The Ice Storm, Ride with the Devil, The Hulk, and the short film "The Chosen" [as part of The Hire series]).
Mr. Elmes' other films as cinematographer include Norman René's Reckless, Barry Hershey's The Empty Mirror, Todd Solondz' Storytelling, and Bill Condon's Kinsey.
He has also shot commercials, music videos, and telefilms. Among the latter have been Charles Burnett's The Wedding and Christopher Reeve's In the Gloaming (for which he received an Emmy Award nomination).
Mr. Elmes was honored, for his films with David Lynch, at the 2000 CamerImage Festival in Poland.

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