The cultural aesthetic of the Britpop and New Labour years was shaped partly by the cinematographer Brian Tufano, who has died aged 83. In films such as Trainspotting (1996), East Is East (1999) and Billy Elliot (2000), he combined social realism and absurdist fantasy, smudging the joins between the two. A typical Tufano production, said the film-maker Saul Metzstein, had “technical polish and a cinematic ambition at odds with its financially modest status”.
He worked for the BBC throughout the 1960s and 70s with directors including Lindsay Anderson, Ken Russell, Stephen Frears, Mike Leigh and Ken Loach. But it was in his work with a younger generation in the 90s that his imaginative cinematic sensibility was most strongly felt. For Danny Boyle, with whom he had already made the BBC period drama series Mr Wroe’s Virgins (1993), he shot the gruesome thriller Shallow Grave (1994) and then Trainspotting, an adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s scabrous novel about heroin addicts in Edinburgh.
