This is the Occupy Cinema LLC ranking of the one hundred cinematographers doing the most consequential work right now. It is a list of the living and the active. Every person on it has shot something you can watch this year, or is between pictures with a credit that still sets the standard.
The ordering is editorial and we are not pretending otherwise. It weighs four things: the strength of the signature work, the degree to which other cinematographers have copied it, technical risk actually taken on set rather than fixed later, and what the person has delivered in the last three years as opposed to the last thirty. That last criterion is why some very famous names sit lower than their awards shelves would suggest, and why several people who were unknown outside the trade five years ago now sit inside the top thirty.
The 2026 awards season sharpened the top of the list considerably. Autumn Durald Arkapaw won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography for Sinners, becoming the first woman and the first Black cinematographer to take the category. Michael Bauman won the American Society of Cinematographers Outstanding Achievement Award for One Battle After Another. Both results are reflected below.
Read it as an argument, not a scoreboard. Then go and disagree with it.
The Occupy Cinema 100
1. Roger Deakins
Key work: Blade Runner 2049, 1917, Sicario, No Country for Old Men, Skyfall
Still the reference point. Two Oscars, sixteen nominations, and a body of work that taught two generations what motivated light means.
2. Emmanuel Lubezki
Key work: The Tree of Life, Children of Men, Gravity, Birdman, The Revenant
Three consecutive Academy Awards. Natural light pushed past where the meter said it would hold, and long takes that made the camera a participant.
3. Hoyte van Hoytema
Key work: Oppenheimer, Interstellar, Her, Dunkirk, Nope
The most committed large-format shooter alive. IMAX black and white on Oppenheimer was a technical bet almost nobody else would have taken.
4. Autumn Durald Arkapaw
Key work: Sinners, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Loki, Palo Alto
Won the 2026 Academy Award for Sinners, the first woman and first Black cinematographer to take the category. Shot it on large-format film and 65mm IMAX.
5. Greig Fraser
Key work: Dune, Dune: Part Two, The Batman, Zero Dark Thirty, Rogue One
Has quietly become the default choice for scale that still feels handmade. His underexposure tolerance is the modern blockbuster look.
6. Rodrigo Prieto
Key work: Killers of the Flower Moon, Brokeback Mountain, Silence, Barbie, The Irishman
Moves between Scorsese epics and pop spectacle without changing his standards. Took the 2026 ASC Music Video award for Taylor Swift The Fate of Ophelia.
7. Robert Richardson
Key work: JFK, The Aviator, Hugo, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Kill Bill
Three Oscars. The hot toplight is his signature and it is still being copied by people who have never seen a Stone film.
8. Lukasz Zal
Key work: Ida, Cold War, The Zone of Interest
Black and white academy ratio on two films, then a locked-off surveillance grid on the third. Proof that restriction is a style.
9. Bruno Delbonnel
Key work: Amelie, Inside Llewyn Davis, Darkest Hour, The Tragedy of Macbeth
Paints with a palette knife. Nobody else builds a colour world that reads as painted rather than photographed.
10. Linus Sandgren
Key work: La La Land, First Man, No Time to Die, Babylon
Won for La La Land. Shoots film almost exclusively and gets a saturated, slightly unstable image that digital still cannot fake.
11. Darius Khondji
Key work: Se7en, Amour, Uncut Gems, Marty Supreme
Range from studio horror to Haneke austerity. Nominated at both the 2026 Oscars and the 2026 ASC Awards for Marty Supreme.
12. Dan Laustsen
Key work: The Shape of Water, Nightmare Alley, John Wick, Frankenstein
Del Toro eye. Deep saturated colour and hard practical sources, and a 2026 nomination for Frankenstein.
13. Michael Bauman
Key work: One Battle After Another, Licorice Pizza
Won the 2026 ASC Outstanding Achievement award for One Battle After Another after years as Anderson gaffer and co-shooter.
14. Matyas Erdely
Key work: Son of Saul, Sunset, Orphan
Won the 2026 ASC Spotlight Award for Orphan. The shallow-focus close follow in Son of Saul rewrote how films photograph atrocity.
15. Claire Mathon
Key work: Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Atlantics, Spencer
Candlelight and skin. Handles faces with more patience than almost anyone shooting in Europe.
16. Ed Lachman
Key work: Carol, Far from Heaven, The Virgin Suicides, El Conde
Six decades in and still experimenting. Carol on Super 16 is the case study in grain as emotional texture.
17. Christopher Doyle
Key work: In the Mood for Love, Chungking Express, Hero
The Wong Kar-wai films are the most imitated frames of the last thirty years. Smeared neon, step printing, impossible reds.
18. Ari Wegner
Key work: The Power of the Dog, Lady Macbeth, Zola, In Fabric
Second woman ever nominated for the cinematography Oscar. Reads landscape as psychology.
19. Lol Crawley
Key work: The Brutalist, 45 Years, Vox Lux, Ballast
Won for The Brutalist. VistaVision revival, shot as if the format had never gone away.
20. Jarin Blaschke
Key work: The Lighthouse, The Witch, Nosferatu
Custom filters, period lenses, orthochromatic stock. The most rigorous historical technician working.
21. Hong Kyung-pyo
Key work: Parasite, Burning, Snowpiercer, Mother
Architecture as class diagram. The Parasite house is a lighting plan before it is a set.
22. Chung Chung-hoon
Key work: Oldboy, The Handmaiden, Last Night in Soho, It
Park Chan-wook camera. Precision moves that never announce themselves as showy until you try to reproduce one.
23. Erik Messerschmidt
Key work: Mank, The Killer, Ferrari, Devotion
Won for Mank. Fincher current collaborator and the most disciplined digital shooter in the business.
24. Matthew Libatique
Key work: Black Swan, Requiem for a Dream, A Star Is Born, Maestro
Aronofsky long-time partner. Handheld intimacy that stays composed under pressure.
25. Robbie Ryan
Key work: The Favourite, Poor Things, Marriage Story, Kinds of Kindness
Lanthimos fisheye and wide-angle grammar, and before that the loose naturalism of the Andrea Arnold films.
26. Sean Bobbitt
Key work: 12 Years a Slave, Hunger, Shame, Judas and the Black Messiah
The McQueen long take. Holds a shot until the audience has to do the work.
27. Bradford Young
Key work: Arrival, Selma, A Most Violent Year, Solo
Exposes for darker skin as the baseline rather than the correction, and lets the rest of the frame fall where it falls.
28. Mandy Walker
Key work: Elvis, Mulan, Australia, Hidden Figures
First woman to win the ASC feature award. Large-scale period work with a genuinely theatrical sense of light.
29. Anthony Dod Mantle
Key work: Slumdog Millionaire, 28 Days Later, Antichrist, Rush
Won for Slumdog. An early digital adopter who used the format ugliness on purpose.
30. Jomo Fray
Key work: Nickel Boys, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, Port Authority
The most interesting new voice in American cinematography. First-person camera on Nickel Boys is a formal risk that pays.
31. Sayombhu Mukdeeprom
Key work: Call Me by Your Name, Suspiria, Uncle Boonmee, Challengers
Weerasethakul collaborator turned international first call. Humid, unhurried, always available light if he can get it.
32. Benoit Debie
Key work: Enter the Void, Spring Breakers, Climax, Irreversible
Gaspar Noe accomplice. Neon, strobe and camera moves that violate every rule about audience comfort.
33. Helene Louvart
Key work: The Lost Daughter, La Chimera, Happy as Lazzaro, Never Rarely Sometimes Always
The connective tissue of contemporary European art cinema. Works small and fast and it never looks cheap.
34. Rachel Morrison
Key work: Mudbound, Fruitvale Station, Black Panther
First woman nominated for the cinematography Oscar. Documentary instincts on narrative sets.
35. Charlotte Bruus Christensen
Key work: Fences, A Quiet Place, The Hunt, Molly Game
Scandinavian restraint applied to American genre. A Quiet Place is a masterclass in staging for silence.
36. Seamus McGarvey
Key work: Atonement, Nocturnal Animals, Anna Karenina, The Avengers
The Dunkirk beach tracking shot in Atonement is still the reference for a single-take set piece with real scale.
37. Janusz Kaminski
Key work: Schindler List, Saving Private Ryan, Lincoln, The Fabelmans
Two Oscars. Defined the late-century Spielberg image: blown highlights, hard backlight, desaturated war.
38. Caleb Deschanel
Key work: The Right Stuff, The Natural, The Passion of the Christ, Never Look Away
Six nominations across five decades and still shooting features.
39. John Toll
Key work: Braveheart, The Thin Red Line, Legends of the Fall, Cloud Atlas
Back-to-back Oscars. Landscape at a scale that reads as weather rather than backdrop.
40. Vittorio Storaro
Key work: Apocalypse Now, The Last Emperor, Reds, Wonder Wheel
Three Oscars and a written theory of colour behind every one of them.
41. Dante Spinotti
Key work: L.A. Confidential, Heat, The Last of the Mohicans, The Insider
Mann night city. The downtown Los Angeles of Heat is a lighting achievement more than a location one.
42. Robert Yeoman
Key work: The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Royal Tenenbaums, Asteroid City, Bridesmaids
Every Wes Anderson live-action feature. Took the 2026 ASC Lifetime Achievement Award.
43. Barry Ackroyd
Key work: The Hurt Locker, United 93, Captain Phillips, Detroit
Multi-camera documentary chaos that still cuts. Came up with Ken Loach and never lost the looseness.
44. Jeff Cronenweth
Key work: Fight Club, The Social Network, Gone Girl
Green-tinted Fincher precision. Nominated at the 2026 ASC Awards for Ariana Grande Supernatural.
45. Claudio Miranda
Key work: Life of Pi, Top Gun: Maverick, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Won for Life of Pi. Solved the problem of shooting six actors in real fighter jets.
46. Wally Pfister
Key work: Inception, The Dark Knight, The Prestige, Batman Begins
Won for Inception. Anchored the Nolan look in real optics and real stunts before IMAX took over.
47. Dariusz Wolski
Key work: Prometheus, The Martian, Napoleon, Pirates of the Caribbean
Ridley Scott multi-camera machine. Shoots enormous scenes with a speed that should not be possible.
48. Rob Hardy
Key work: Ex Machina, Annihilation, Mission: Impossible Fallout, Devs
Clean, cold, geometric. The Garland films are the best-looking science fiction of the last decade.
49. Larkin Seiple
Key work: Everything Everywhere All at Once, Swiss Army Man, Cocaine Bear
Made a multiverse legible on an indie budget with in-camera tricks instead of a render farm.
50. Benjamin Kracun
Key work: Promising Young Woman, The Substance, Beast
Candy-coloured surfaces over something rotten. The Substance is the boldest body-horror palette in years.
51. Pawel Pogorzelski
Key work: Hereditary, Midsommar, Beau Is Afraid, Bodies Bodies Bodies
Ari Aster eye. Dollhouse framing and daylight dread.
52. Florian Hoffmeister
Key work: Tar, The Terror, Great Expectations
Nominated for Tar. Cold institutional interiors, and a camera that watches rather than sympathises.
53. Jody Lee Lipes
Key work: Manchester by the Sea, Ma Rainey Black Bottom, A Complete Unknown
Unshowy naturalism. Trusts a wide shot and a good performance more than coverage.
54. Shabier Kirchner
Key work: Small Axe, Skate Kitchen, Bull
The Lovers Rock episode of Small Axe is forty minutes of a party photographed as if it were scripture.
55. Adolpho Veloso
Key work: Train Dreams, The Fire Inside
Nominated at both the 2026 Oscars and the 2026 ASC Awards for Train Dreams.
56. Adam Arkapaw
Key work: Macbeth, True Detective, Top of the Lake, Assassin Creed
The six-minute tracking shot in True Detective changed what television thought it could attempt.
57. Marcell Rev
Key work: Euphoria, Malcolm and Marie, White Boy Rick
The Euphoria look is now a whole aesthetic vocabulary for a generation of music videos and ads.
58. Alice Brooks
Key work: In the Heights, Wicked, tick tick BOOM
The current first call for the American movie musical. Knows how to keep a big number readable.
59. Phedon Papamichael
Key work: Walk the Line, Sideways, The Trial of the Chicago 7, Ford v Ferrari
Payne collaborator. Warm, unfussy, always in service of the scene.
60. Newton Thomas Sigel
Key work: Drive, Three Kings, The Usual Suspects, Bohemian Rhapsody
The Los Angeles night of Drive is a lighting design that launched a thousand imitations.
61. Bill Pope
Key work: Baby Driver, The Matrix, Spider-Man 2, Scott Pilgrim
Choreographs camera to music better than almost anyone. Baby Driver is edited to his blocking, not the reverse.
62. Peter Deming
Key work: Mulholland Drive, Twin Peaks: The Return, Evil Dead II, Doctor Strange
Lynch cinematographer. Knows exactly how much darkness an audience will tolerate.
63. Dion Beebe
Key work: Chicago, Collateral, Memoirs of a Geisha, Edge of Tomorrow
Won for Memoirs. Collateral was one of the first films to make digital night photography an argument rather than a compromise.
64. Russell Carpenter
Key work: Titanic, True Lies, Avatar: The Way of Water
Won for Titanic. Has now solved underwater performance capture twice, twenty-five years apart.
65. Mauro Fiore
Key work: Avatar, Training Day, The Kingdom
Won for Avatar. Grounded a fully synthetic world in recognisable natural light.
66. Tom Stern
Key work: Million Dollar Baby, Letters from Iwo Jima, American Sniper
Eastwood cinematographer. Underexposes with total confidence and never fills a face he does not want lit.
67. Masanobu Takayanagi
Key work: Spotlight, Silver Linings Playbook, The Grey, Nyad
Invisible craft. You never notice the camera in Spotlight, which is the entire point.
68. Ellen Kuras
Key work: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Blow, Summer of Sam
In-camera memory effects on Eternal Sunshine that still look better than the digital version would.
69. Maryse Alberti
Key work: The Wrestler, Creed, Velvet Goldmine, The Visit
Documentary roots. Shot the Creed one-take fight and made it feel found rather than staged.
70. Reed Morano
Key work: The Handmaid Tale, Meadowland, The Skeleton Twins
Established the Gilead palette, then moved to directing without losing her photographic instincts.
71. Natasha Braier
Key work: The Neon Demon, Honey Boy, The Milk of Sorrow
The Neon Demon is the most aggressive use of saturated colour in recent American film.
72. Eduard Grau
Key work: A Single Man, Buried, Passing, The Gentlemen
Passing in black and white academy ratio is a formal choice that carries the film whole argument.
73. Nicolas Karakatsanis
Key work: I Tonya, The Drop, Cruella, Bullet Train
Moves between grubby crime and high-gloss studio work without losing a consistent sense of texture.
74. Andrij Parekh
Key work: Succession, Half Nelson, Blue Valentine
The Succession language of long lenses and caught reactions is now the default grammar for prestige television.
75. Ben Richardson
Key work: Beasts of the Southern Wild, Wind River, The Bear, Yellowstone
Handheld naturalism at scale. The Bear kitchen is claustrophobia built with a lens choice.
76. Jessica Lee Gagne
Key work: Severance, Kuessipan
Nominated at the 2026 ASC Awards for Severance. The Lumon floor is one of the most controlled interiors on television.
77. Adam Newport-Berra
Key work: The Studio, The Last Black Man in San Francisco
Won the 2026 ASC half-hour award for The Studio, a show built almost entirely on continuous takes.
78. Dana Gonzales
Key work: Fargo, Legion, Alien: Earth
Nominated at the 2026 ASC Awards for Alien: Earth. Makes anamorphic television look like cinema on a television schedule.
79. Ben Kutchins
Key work: Ozark, The White Lotus, Mozart in the Jungle
The Ozark blue is a colour-timing decision that became the show brand. Nominated in 2026 for The White Lotus.
80. Adam Bricker
Key work: Hacks, The Chair, Never Have I Ever
Comedy shot with dramatic care. Nominated at the 2026 ASC Awards for Hacks.
81. Igor Martinovic
Key work: The Night Of, Black Rabbit, House of Cards
Nominated in 2026 for Black Rabbit. Urban night photography with real depth.
82. Christophe Nuyens
Key work: Andor, The Ardennes
Co-winner of the 2026 ASC one-hour award for Andor, a Star Wars series photographed like a political thriller.
83. Alex Disenhof
Key work: Task
Co-winner of the 2026 ASC one-hour award for Task.
84. Pete Konczal
Key work: Black Rabbit, Manifest
Won the 2026 ASC limited series award for Black Rabbit.
85. Colin Watkinson
Key work: The Handmaid Tale, The Fall, The Immortals
Took over Gilead and kept it consistent across years of production.
86. Zoe White
Key work: The Handmaid Tale, Nine Perfect Strangers
Emmy-nominated television work with a painterly sense of interior light.
87. Quyen Tran
Key work: Palm Springs, Maid, The Girl on the Train
Maid is poverty photographed without condescension, which is harder than it sounds.
88. Polly Morgan
Key work: A Quiet Place Part II, Where the Crawdads Sing, Lucy in the Sky
One of a small number of women shooting studio tentpoles, and she does it with genuine formal ideas.
89. Kira Kelly
Key work: 13th, Queen Sugar, Fast Color
Documentary and narrative in parallel, with a consistent commitment to how Black skin is lit.
90. Rina Yang
Key work: Top Boy, Swarm
Came out of music videos and brought that saturated, tactile energy into long-form drama.
91. Crystel Fournier
Key work: Girlhood, Tomboy, Water Lilies
The Sciamma early films. Adolescence photographed without nostalgia.
92. Agnes Godard
Key work: Beau Travail, Trouble Every Day, 35 Shots of Rum
Claire Denis collaborator. Bodies and heat, rarely a word of exposition in the image.
93. Caroline Champetier
Key work: Holy Motors, Of Gods and Men, Annette
Five decades of French cinema, from Godard camera department to Carax late features.
94. Christian Berger
Key work: The White Ribbon, Cache, The Piano Teacher
Nominated for The White Ribbon. Developed his own lighting system to work with almost no units on set.
95. Gokhan Tiryaki
Key work: Winter Sleep, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
Ceylan cinematographer. Anatolian landscape photographed with the patience of a painter.
96. Mark Lee Ping-bing
Key work: The Assassin, Three Times, In the Mood for Love
Hou Hsiao-hsien collaborator and co-shooter on In the Mood for Love. Diffusion and distance.
97. Diego Garcia
Key work: Cemetery of Splendour, Wildlife, Neon Bull
Moves between Thai slow cinema and American indie drama with the same unhurried eye.
98. David Gallego
Key work: Embrace of the Serpent, I Am No Longer Here, Monos
Embrace of the Serpent in black and white is one of the great recent debuts.
99. Mstyslav Chernov
Key work: 20 Days in Mariupol, 2000 Meters from Andriivka
Won the 2026 ASC documentary award with Alex Babenko. Photojournalism at the highest personal cost.
100. M. David Mullen
Key work: The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Jennifer Body, Northfork
Took the 2026 ASC Career Achievement in Television award. Maisel is the most ambitious period television lighting of the last decade.
How we built the list
Names were drawn from the last five years of Academy Award and American Society of Cinematographers nominations, the equivalent guild lists in the United Kingdom, Europe, Australia and Korea, festival competition slates, and the working credits of every feature and series our editors logged across the period. Award recognition got a person considered. It did not get them ranked. Several of the highest placements here have never won a competitive Academy Award.
Two deliberate exclusions. We left out cinematographers who have died, however large the shadow, because this is a list about who to hire and who to study right now. And we left out second unit and additional photography credits, which are real craft but a different job.
Corrections and arguments go to the editors. We update this list annually.
Compiled and published by Occupy Cinema LLC.