Paul Yule 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, awards from the Royal Television Society, an Edward Morrow Prize, and an Amnesty International Prize.
Yule was born in Johannesburg, South Africa and his family emigrated to England when he was eight years old. He studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford University and documented the early theatre work of contemporaries Rowan Atkinson, Richard Curtis and others of that generation. After leaving Oxford, Yule went to Peru for eight months working as photographer on The Cusichaca Project near Cusco. He founded Berwick Universal Pictures and, 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, made for the BBC's Arena strand, which depicts the life, times, and contemporary relevance of Martin Chambi, a 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 photography and films has included history, politics, religion, sport and the arts. He has collaborated with several writers, including with Nicholas Shakespeare on films about Mario Vargas Llosa and Bruce Chatwin; with Peter Oborne on exposés of Robert Mugabe and the conspiracy surrounding the cricketer Basil D'Oliveira; as well as with Darcus Howe, Miranda Sawyer, Paul Morley, Luke Holland and others. In 2003 he directed an acclaimed drama about Sir Edward Elgar, Elgar's Tenth Muse starring James Fox and written by Nigel Gearing. He has also made a number of films in war zones, often shooting his own material - notably Babitski's War (2000, in Chechnya), The House of War (2002, in Afghanistan), Mugabe's Secret Famine (2003, in Zimbabwe), and Here's One We Invaded Earlier (2003, in Afghanistan).
In 2008 Yule completed a three-film history of apartheid in South Africa and its consequences (White Lies; The Basil D'Oliveira Conspiracy; and The Captain and the Bookmaker). In 2011 he was invited to teach filmmaking at The University of Cape Town where he originated "The Big Picture", an intensive, documentary course aimed at training a new generation of filmmakers to make fresh, socially relevant, local programming and was centrally involved in the re-launch of Cape Town's community television station, CTV. In 2013 and 2015 he was show-runner on two seasons of Dream School SA, a reality TV series about education in South Africa.
Recent work includes All Out In Pakistan (2017) which looks at the relationship of cricket to politics in Pakistan, and The Life of Jo Menell (2019), a film about the iconoclastic activist filmmaker.
In 2021 a retrospective of his photography, "My Developing Eye", was published.
