Paul Yule is an Emmy Award-winning British filmmaker and photographer whose work spans more than four decades across documentary film and fine art photography.

Film work

Directed and produced numerous films for the BBC and Channel 4. The documentary Damned in the USA became the subject of a landmark legal case in the United States, successfully challenging an attempt to block its distribution and establishing an important precedent in the defence of artistic freedom.

Other films include Battle for the Holocaust, a widely recognised and influential film exploring contested histories of the Holocaust, as well as The House of War, The Basil D’Oliveira Conspiracy, White Lies, Waiting for Armageddon, Good Morning Mr. Hitler!, and In The Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin.

Work has received international recognition, including an Emmy Award, several Royal Television Society awards, an Amnesty International Prize and an Edward Morrow Prize.

Photography

Alongside filmmaking, Yule has maintained a parallel photographic career. His work often explores long-term engagements with place, identity and history, combining documentary observation with a strong formal sensibility.

My Developing Eye is a retrospective of his photographic work, which continues to be exhibited internationally, including early curatorial work on the photographer Martín Chambi at The Photographers’ Gallery in London. His book The New Incas brings together an expanded and remastered collection of photographs taken over four decades in and around Cusco, Peru – the work traces the intersection of tradition, modernity and global influence in a region undergoing profound change.

Across both film and photography, his work continues to engage with contemporary questions while drawing on a substantial archive built over a lifetime of looking and recording.

Early Career

Photographed the early theatre work of Rowan Atkinson, Richard Curtis and others of their generation while studying at Oxford between 1975-78. In 1979 went to Peru from which followed The New Incas (1983), a book of photographs published by The New Pyramid Press, and his first film, Martin Chambi and the Heirs of the Incas (1986), a documentary about the iconic Peruvian photographer made for the BBC’s Arena strand. Trains That Passed in the Night (1990), for Channel 4, was a film about the great American photographer of steam, O. Winston Link, whose troubled personal story he returned to more than a decade later in The Photographer, His Wife, Her Lover (2005).

Damned In The USA

Yule’s documentary about censorship and the arts, Damned in the USA, won the International Emmy for Best Documentary before becoming embroiled in a landmark legal dispute in 1991/2. In an attempt to stop US distribution, Rev. Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association sued Yule, his co-producer Jonathan Stack, and Channel 4 for $8 million. Wildmon described the film as “blasphemous and obscene”. Channel 4 fought the high-profile lawsuit in court in Mississippi – and won – but not before Lou Reed had re-written the lyrics to his classic Walk on the Wild Side in support of the case.