The most inexhaustible landscapes for me remain faces and bodies: I like to look at people, to look at them in order to love them. It's like dancing with someone, except with a camera you don't touch them. I just want to tell them that I'd like to put my hand on them.

In film after film over the last twenty years, Agnès Godard (b. 1951) has demonstrated an unerring ability to create arresting images that draw the audience into the world onscreen rather than announce their own virtuosity. Among the world's most important cinematographers, Godard's work in collaboration with filmmakers from Wim Wenders to Agnès Varda to Claire Denis has exerted a determining influence on much of the most ambitious contemporary filmmaking.

A child of the French provinces, Godard studied journalism before finding the courage to pursue a career in cinema and enroll in photography at the famed Paris film school IDHEC. Following her first job as a cinematographer on Wenders' Chambre 666 (1982), Godard continued to work on Wenders projects as well as on films by Joseph Losey and Agnès Varda. Befriending another IDHEC graduate, Claire Denis, Godard became one of Denis' closest collaborators, shooting almost all of her films since 1990 while also working with a number of remarkable directors – including André Téchiné and Claude Berri.

Godard's multifaceted style is grounded in her strong preference for saturated colors and a freely mobile, often handheld camera. Distilling the art of the cinematographer to its essential elements Godard avoids baroque camera movement or complicated visual effects, using light and color to illuminate and reveal the human figure and the world it inhabits, rendering them simultaneously recognizable and extraordinary. – David Pendleton