Janusz Kaminski wins THR Visionary Cinematographer Award

Like almost all great filmmakers, Janusz Kamiński is Polish. Like any artist of his generation, he also learned in Hollywood how to see.

Kamiński, winner of THRThe 2026 Visionary Prize for excellence in cinematography, awarded on Saturday at the Camerimage festival, grew up in Ziębice, a small town where, according to his memories, the world was gray. “Even though we didn’t think it was dark, it was dark,” Kamiński says. “No billboards. No advertising. The streets were dark. People were dressed in darker tones.” In winter, houses were heated with coal and smoke from each chimney hung in the air. “The air had this thickness, like a fog, because of the coal particles.”

But there was a lot of nostalgia in that gray. “Poland is, to a certain extent, a very lyrical country,” he says. “There is this melancholy, this certain desire for something else.” Theater troupes passed through and local cinema promised a world beyond the city. “We were exposed to work that we had not experienced in real life, but wanted to experience,” explains Kamiński. “The main reason I left home is because of theater, cinema and a life in color.”

Kamiński left Poland as a political refugee in 1981, dreaming of American films. He didn’t speak English. Landing in Chicago, he spent two years learning the language and then enrolled part-time at Columbia College. During an introductory film class, he found himself in a group of five people. “We each had to choose: one would be the writer, one would be the actor, one would be the director, one would be the producer and one would be the cinematographer,” he recalls. “We literally chose straws. I got the movie theater. I was 22.”

It was love at first sight. “I discovered that I really enjoyed creating images. It was just fascinating for me to see the flickering image on 16mm black and white,” he says. “Just this mystery: Will it be brought into focus? Will it be properly exposed? Will it have a story?” A teacher told him he was good at it and should continue. “It’s not a sad story, but it was the first time I was told I was good at something,” says Kamiński. “In Poland, when I grew up, no one said that kind of thing. It was: you have to eat, you eat, you are good.”

All of his Columbia classmates wanted to direct, so Kamiński shot their films. He loaded a station wagon with equipment every weekend, made student films, and landed commercial jobs as a camera assistant, electrician, and stagehand. One commercial per month would bring in $250. “My rent was $280, so I was doing well,” he says. “I had a job, and for an immigrant it’s essential to support yourself, because there was no mom or dad or cousins.”

At first, The Hollywood Reporter came to his aid. At the time, on the back of the magazine, THR has compiled lists of films currently in production, including location shoots. “That’s how I got my first jobs, thanks to The Hollywood Reporter“, says Kamiński. “I would look at the list of films and I wouldn’t call for a Tom Cruise film, but if it was something like Bambis from hellI called the producer and said: “Hello, my name is Janusz Kamiński. I am a filmmaker. Would you like to look at my work? I made my first two feature films from it.

Kaminski knew Chicago wouldn’t take him to Hollywood. “Most films that would be produced in California would go to Chicago and use secondary crew members,” he says. “I don’t want to be secondary.” His girlfriend filled out an application to the American Film Institute and he was accepted. “It was 1986/87. I moved to California, another place I had never been. I didn’t have a car.” He rented accommodation a short walk from campus.

A classmate’s husband, a cinematographer, was shooting a film for Roger Corman and needed a key assistant. Kamiński accepted the position. “Meanwhile, the gaffer quit. So I said, I like lighting. Leave me alone. So I became the gaffer.” He continued to make secondary films and small independent films while he completed his studies.

The real breakthrough came thanks to its demo. A friend of a friend was Diane Keaton’s assistant. “He shows my demo, my student film demo, to Diane Keaton and, all of a sudden, I have a job filming for Diane Keaton.” The film was Wildflower, a period TV movie starring Patricia Arquette and Beau Bridges. Steven Spielberg saw it and offered Kaminski another TV gig, Class of ’61, a pilot that Spielberg was producing. The show, about West Point cadets on the eve of the Civil War, was not picked up. But Spielberg liked what he saw. After the pilot was finished, the two met. “He said, ‘I’d like you to do my next film. I’m doing a black and white film called Schindler’s List. Would you be interested?’

Spielberg first went to make Jurassic Park. “It took him eight to nine months to finish editing,” Kamiński recalls. “All this time, I knew I had an upcoming job with Steven Spielberg. But no one believed me. It wasn’t until I shot the movie that it became a reality.”

With Spielberg, Kamiński returned to Poland. The film he made there, full of the gray light and smoky streets he grew up in, changed the way Hollywood filmed history. He says they barely discussed the visual style beforehand. “We knew the film would be shot in Poland and in black and white, but we didn’t have an in-depth discussion about how we were going to make this film,” he recalls. “We just wanted to remove anything that might take us away from the story, so there was no crane, no dolly and no Steadicam. I introduced the idea of ​​using a handheld.”

Schindler’s List earned Kamiński his first Academy Award for Best Cinematography. We must save Private Ryan gained him a second. The script for this film, he points out, contained a sentence about the Normandy landings: “Now the troops are landing in Normandy. That’s it. So as a director of photography, you have to create the language that corresponds to the story, the emotions, the settings and the locations.” What he and Spielberg came up with, all portable, drained of color and chaotic, rewrote the language of the war film.

Filming by Julian Schnabel The diving suit and the butterflyKamiński took another phenomenal visual approach to depicting the story of a man with locked-in syndrome, able to see the world only through one functioning eye. In the film, which won Camerimage’s Golden Frog award in 2007, the lens shifts abruptly, blurring most of the field of view while some details appear with intense clarity.

“The script and the book it is based on are excellent,” says Kamiński, but he provides little direction. “The full description is: ‘The hero returns from the darkness, after being unconscious for the last two weeks, and begins to see the world through one eye.’ That’s it.”

Despite certain aesthetic preferences — “I like strong light, especially backlighting, I like characters in dim light, moving in and out of the shadows. I like smoke,” he says — Kamiński doesn’t have a signature look. His approach is that film follows function. Cold blues and metallic shadows to evoke the technological dystopia of Minority report. Retro pastels and fluid tracking shots to rock the 60s Catch me if you can. Grainy handheld shots of muted oranges and browns Munich to give the story the feel of a 1970s conspiracy thriller.

The Kamiński/Spielberg collaboration, now spanning 30 years and more than 20 films, must count as one of the most significant artistic collaborations in the history of American cinema. His work with Kamiński marks the second phase of Spielberg’s career, as the director moved from classic, glossy Hollywood imagery, bright lights and vibrant colors, to a rawer, more naturalistic style, appropriate for the more mature and morally ambivalent stories he wanted to tell.

Kamiński doesn’t claim credit for the director’s evolution. “Steven wasn’t ready to do Schindler’s List until he was ready,” he says. “He was moving in that direction and I came into his life at the right time where he was able to accept the aesthetics I gave him and embrace them. I think what he saw in me was someone new with a new point of view, someone who wasn’t biased by Hollywood, with a new approach. He considered me a partner. And I saw him as a partner.

The partnership continues on Spielberg’s latest film, Disclosure dayin which Kamiński works in a different register. “As I get older, things become more simplistic,” he says. “I want to go a little more reserved, relaxed.”

For the film, a sci-fi thriller about aliens but set in the present, he says he was aiming for “something more naturalistic, more contemporary.” In one scene, in a hideout, a very direct gray light comes through the window, slightly green, with a little stray light in the background. “There is austerity in the images,” says Kamiński, “and that comes from growing up in Poland, with the images of my childhood.”

Next comes another collaboration with Spielberg, on an untitled western, the director’s first, which Spielberg hopes to shoot next year. Kamiński is already…