Paul Yule (photojournalist)
Paul Harris Yule (born 1956) is a photojournalist and film maker. In addition to his photography, he has directed more than 30 films on six continents, often on controversial political and social themes, several of which have won major awards, including an International Emmy (for Damned in the USA - Berwick Universal Pictures, 1990), awards from the Royal Television Society, an Edward Morrow Prize, and an Amnesty International Prize. He founded the production company Berwick Universal Pictures in London in 1980. Life and work Paul Yule was born in Johannesburg, South Africa and his family emigrated to England when he was eight years old. He went to Aldenham School and then studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) at Oxford University. His first outlet for photojournalism was working for the Oxford University magazine Isis, and documenting the early theatre work of contemporaries Rowan Atkinson, Richard Curtis and others of that generation. After leaving Oxford in 1979, Yule went to Peru for eight months working as photographer on The Cusichaca Project near Cusco. In 1980 he founded Berwick Universal Pictures with photographer Chris Plytas, working from a basement studio in Berwick Street, London, and that same year he did the photography and design for Rowan Atkinson's Live in Belfast album. In 1983, following several further visits to Peru, his book The New Incas (with an introduction by John Hemming) was published by The New Pyramid Press and the photographs were exhibited widely, including at Side Gallery in Newcastle, the Royal Geographical Society and The Photographers' Gallery in London. Photography in Peru became the subject of his first documentary film, Martin Chambi and the Heirs of the Incas (1986), made for the BBC's Arena strand, which depicts the life, times, and contemporary relevance of that great Cusqueña photographer of the early 20th century. This was the first of half a dozen documentaries Yule made in Peru over the next two decades, and the start of an award-winning collaboration with the producer Andy Harries. In 1990 Yule made Trains That Passed in the Night, a lyrical film about another great photographer, the American O. Winston Link, whose troubled personal story he was to return to and re-assess 15 years later in The Photographer, His Wife, Her Lover (2005). In 1991-92 Yule's Channel 4 documentary Damned in the USA, a film about censorship and the arts in the US that features Rev. Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association, became embroiled in a landmark legal dispute. Though the film had already won the International Emmy, Wildmon and the AFA sued Yule, his co-producer Jonathan Stack, and Channel 4 for $8 million in an attempt to stop the distribution of the film, describing it as "blasphemous and obscene". Yule and his co-defendants fought the lawsuit in court in Mississippi and won the legal right to freely exhibit the film. Lou Reed re-wrote the lyrics to his classic "Walk on the Wild Side" in support of the case. The subject matter of Yule's films has included history,