CR 073: Cinematographer Nicholas Kraus on the Art of Capturing Unscripted Moments
The Emmy Award-winning DP discusses his work on the high-profile documentaries “Bad Influence” and “The Alabama Solution.”
Nicholas Kraus has shot everything from music videos and short films to television series and investigative longform documentaries. A graduate of Columbia University, Kraus spent three years as the in-house cinematographer for VICE News Tonight and in 2021 won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Cinematography in a Documentary for his work on Showtime’s The Trade. This year, his versatility was on full display with the release of two highly publicized and wildly different projects: the Netflix kidfluencer tragedy Bad Influence and HBO’s The Alabama Solution, an exposé of corruption and abuse inside Alabama’s prison system.
Though the two films are entirely separate projects, Kraus admits that it’s interesting to discuss them in tandem. “They are similar in that injustices and potentially illegal things are happening,” he says. “And in both, the camera is searching and uncovering.”
Over a recent Zoom call, Kraus discussed the disparate visual language of…
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