Ivan Strasburg BSC is a South African-born cinematographer whose career has taken him from documentary filmmaking in Britain and the United States to some of the most acclaimed television dramas and feature films of the past five decades.
Strasburg was born and educated in South Africa. In 1965, he left the country and came to London as a political exile. He studied at the London Film School in 1966 and 1967, beginning a career that would initially be rooted in documentary cinematography. From the late 1960s through the mid-1980s he worked extensively as a freelance cameraman, photographing documentaries for British and American television.
His early documentary credits included A Life Apart: Anxieties in a Trawling Community (1973), The People's Land, Eskimos of Pond Inlet (1976), The Palestinian (1977), I Heard It Through the Grapevine (1982) and Papua New Guinea: Anthropology on Trial (1983). He also photographed the acclaimed Suffolk feature Akenfield (1974), directed by Peter Hall, a film celebrated for its use of local non-professional performers and its distinctive documentary-like approach.
By the mid-1980s Strasburg had moved increasingly into feature films and television drama. His credits included Nineteen Nineteen (1985), Flanagan (1985) and Bill Forsyth's Rita, Sue and Bob Too (1987). He also worked on Roland Joffé's The Killing Fields (1984) as second-unit director of photography.
Television soon became a major part of his career. He photographed episodes of Agatha Christie's Poirot and became closely associated with British television drama during the late 1980s and 1990s. His work on Cracker, the acclaimed ITV drama starring Robbie Coltrane, brought him one of his first major industry honours. In 1994, he won the BAFTA Television Craft Award for Cracker.
Strasburg subsequently developed an international career, working on television films, series and features on both sides of the Atlantic. His credits included The Theory of Flight, The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Tale, A Raisin in the Sun, Lackawanna Blues, Shooting Dogs and Another Happy Day.
One of his most important achievements came with Paul Greengrass's Bloody Sunday (2002), the powerful feature film depicting the events of Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland in 1972. Strasburg's cinematography contributed to the film's stark, immediate visual style, which placed the audience within the chaos of the day's events. His work was recognised with the 2003 BAFTA Television Craft Award.
Bloody Sunday was also a significant international success. The film won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival, while Strasburg received further recognition for his cinematography. His work on the production demonstrated the documentary instincts that had characterised his earliest career, applied to a large-scale dramatic reconstruction of real historical events.
Strasburg's international television work subsequently brought him two Primetime Emmy nominations for Outstanding Cinematography for a Miniseries or Movie. He was nominated in 2003 for the HBO television film Live from Baghdad, and again in 2009 for the Generation Kill episode Combat Jack.
His work on Generation Kill reunited him with the kind of observational, documentary-influenced filmmaking that had characterised his early career. The HBO miniseries, based on the experiences of US Marines during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, required an unusually immediate and naturalistic visual approach. Strasburg photographed seven episodes of the series.
Among his later achievements was The Tale (2018), starring Laura Dern. Strasburg shared cinematography duties on the production with Denis Lenoir, ASC, photographing a film whose subject matter required a particularly sensitive approach to memory, trauma and the uncertain boundary between recollection and reality. He subsequently photographed episodes of 13 Reasons Why.