Rachel Morrison, 1978-

By Toby Berryman

Mudbound, 2017, film still

Amidst the recent furore over Oscars biases, I wondered which category was the slowest to acknowledge the work of women. Perhaps ‘Best Director’ (following the media-frenzy surrounding Kathryn Bigelow’s 2009 win, and Lina Wertmüller’s groundbreaking nomination three-decades beforehand), ‘Best Picture’ (which indeed took over forty years to nominate a female producer), or even ‘Best Animated Feature’ (an award not formed itself until 2000)? However, with these guesses I was wildly incorrect. In fact, the artistic injustice extends far longer than anyone would care to think.

Instead, it took exactly ninety years and almost 600 other nominees before a female artist was nominated for the Academy Award for ‘Best Cinematography’. That nominee was Rachel Morrison, her nominated film 2017’s Mudbound, and her career thus far reminiscent of injustices seen historically throughout the traditional art-world. Whilst many of us have studied male-exclusivity and restrictions upon artistic education within the nineteenth-century and earlier, Morrison too has rallied against “male peers skipping ahead” within cinematography, in our very own twenty-first-century. And yet, it is not solely gendered discrimination which has tainted Rachel Morrison’s historic career in film, but also artistic discrimination, and the dismissals of contemporary scholarship which refuses to consider her practice as ‘art’.

Morrison herself believes the role of cinematographer is “to visualise emotion” and therefore, I include her story here to acknowledge the ever-increasing diversity of both media and practitioners which are contained within our modern and dynamic definition of art, in 2024. Inherently visual, distinctly creative, and utilising a media which is increasingly-adopted by so-called ‘traditional’ artists; ignorance of Rachel Morrison’s status as a contemporary ‘artist’ seems purely regressive and reflective of the same biases which threatened her career.

Rather intriguingly, it was not cinema but the longstanding artform of photography which first captured Morrison’s interest growing up. An only child, she witnessed family tragedy at the age of fifteen, with her mum’s passing and father’s continued illness. Hence, she both utilised and appreciated photography as a means to capture memories and remediate the tragedy of life’s frailty, at a very early age. Both buoyed by her mother’s own creative eye and inspired by the great photojournalists Robert Capa, James Nachtwey, and Dorothea Lange – the latter of whom was also Born This Week - Morrison pursued a joint-degree (which she ascribes to a distinctly relatable career-indecisiveness) in both photography and film at NYU. Although by the time of her graduation, Morrison’s career had formally focused on cinematography, it remains interesting to see the influence of her photography-background within her filmic work; prioritising the visual and evidencing an attuned awareness to the individual nature of each frame.

The first few years of her cinematic career proved sporadic, something she later attributed to a need for female practitioners to “prove [themselves] time and time again” whilst men are offered work sooner. However, once she was eventually handed an opportunity in the mid-2000s, her career gained remarkable momentum. For Rikers High (2005), only her second major project, she was nominated for the Emmy for ‘Outstanding Achievement in Cinematography’ and when Morrison’s Dope (2015) premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, it marked her seventh film to screen there in six consecutive years. Even more impressively, such success was achieved before she had joined the American Society of Cinematographers, an elite-organisation for those in the industry.

However, such joy and success were matched by utter devastation for Morrison in late 2014, when life interfered with work. Following a successful collaboration with director Ryan Coogler on Fruitvale Station (2013), Morrison was rightly excited by a call regarding his forthcoming Rocky spin-off Creed. Coogler wanted Morrison, but the shooting schedule overlapped with the final months of her pregnancy and she had to turn down her first big-budget job. At the time fearful that it was “a death knell” for her career, Morrison, her wife Rachel, and newly-born baby-boy knew nothing of what was to come, as her next project promptly placed her amongst the history books!

Black Panther, 2018, film still

Fortunately for us, the mistiming of Creed did not spell the end of Rachel Morrison’s career, but rather the beginning of a new-found fame and public-presence, distinctly unusual for cinematographers. Her pregnancy was immediately followed by work for Netflix, shooting Dee Rees’ historical drama Mudbound, and it was for this project which she received her momentous Oscar nomination. Filming lasted only twenty-nine days across multiple countries and adjusting to weather ranging from tornadoes to blistering heat (from which Morrison developed sun poisoning), Morrison’s feat was critically-lauded worldwide. For Mudbound, she sought a visually “subjective naturalism” drawn from the very same photojournalists who identified the American reality that had once inspired her as a childhood photographer. Thankfully, it was also not long after this triumph before Coogler called once-again, recruiting Morrison for Black Panther (2018), a Hollywood blockbuster like nothing she had ever worked on before. A testament to her unerring creativity, Black Panther settled amongst the highest-grossing movies of all time and the stunning visual weltbild which Morrison carefully curated continues to engross audiences to this day.

In recent years, Morrison has worked on her directorial debut-feature The Fire Inside (to be released this Summer). Since her nomination in 2017, a further two female cinematographers have been recognised with the same honour, to which Morrison herself duly declared “about fucking time!”

Bibliography

Beresford, T. “Meet Rachel Morrison: A Smart Girl Rocking the Cinematography World”. Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls. January 28, 2016. https://amysmartgirls.com/meet-rachel-morrison-a-smart-girl-rocking-the-cinematography-world-880fc4f9e8a8.

Frost, J. “Rachel Morrison, ASC – Chapter 13”. In Conversations with Contemporary Cinematographers: The Eye Behind the Lens, 214-228. London: Routledge, 2021.

Giardina, C. “Rachel Morrison Becomes First Woman Nominated for a Cinematography Oscar”. The Hollywood Reporter. January 23, 2018. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/rachel-morrison-becomes-first-woman-nominated-a-cinematography-oscar-1077118/.

Lambert, M. “Rachel Morrison Wants More Women Behind The Camera”. New York Times (Sunday Magazine), National Edition. February 25, 2018. https://nytimes.com/2018/02/21/magazine/rachel-morrison-wants-more-women-behind-the-camera.html.

Morrison, R. “FIRSTS – Rachel Morrison, Ideas”. TIME Magazine. March 1, 2018. https://time.com/5179594/rachel-morrison-firsts/.

Nicholson, A. “Black Panther Cinematographer Rachel Morrison’s Life Behind the Lens”. Rolling Stone Magazine. March 6, 2019. https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/black-panther-rachel-morrison-cinematographer-interview-796902/.

Sperling, N. “Black Panther Cinematographer Rachel Morrison Shoots and Scores”. Vanity Fair Magazine. February 16, 2018. https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/02/rachel-morrison-mudbound-black-panther-cinematographer.