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The cinematographer Gordon Willis, who has died aged 82, will always be associated with one decade, the 1970s, and three directors, Alan Pakula, Francis Ford Coppola and Woody Allen. Willis was the director of photography of all three men's breakthrough movies: Klute (1971), The Godfather (1972) and Annie Hall (1977) respectively. Though all three movies won Oscars, Willis was not granted even a nomination for them. The only Academy Award he received was an honorary one in 2009 "for unsurpassed mastery of light, shadow, colour and motion".

He was a favourite of Allen, who used him on eight pictures, and of Pakula, for whom he made six films, including All the President's Men (1976). His relationship with Coppola, with whom he shot only the three Godfather movies, for the sake of aesthetic consistency, was less cordial.

Willis walked off the set more than once on the first Godfather picture, in protest at what he saw as Coppola's incompetence. He maintained that he and Coppola had agreed that it should be a tableau movie, with the actors moving in and out of frame, giving it the feel of a 40s picture. "Francis wasn't well-schooled in that kind of movie-making," Willis said. "You can't shoot a classic movie like video theatre." Coppola commented: "The whole visual style was set out before we shot one foot of film. We talked about the contrast between good and evil, light and dark. How we'd really use darkness, how we'd start out with a black sheet of paper and paint in the light." This was to become a defining feature of Willis's camerawork, and earned him the nickname "The Prince of Darkness".

Willis was born in Queens, New York City, the son a make-up man at Warner Brothers in Brooklyn. At a young age, he became interested in lighting and stage design, later turning to photography. As a member of the US air force motion picture unit for four years during the Korean war, he said: "I learned everything I could about making movies." After leaving the air force, he spent some years working in advertising, where he learned to pare down his style. In 1968, the maverick film-maker Aram Avakian chose Willis to work as director of photography on the counterculture black comedy End of the Road (1970).

But it was the shadowy effects of Klute – a film noir in muted colour – which set Willis on the road to fame, and prompted Coppola to hire him for The Godfather.

The set of The Godfather: Part III. The set of The Godfather: Part III. Willis is standing to Francis Ford Coppola's left. Photograph: Stacy Walsh Rosenstock/Alamy

Darkly lit, it evoked the sombre atmosphere of the criminal underworld which, in The Godfather, Part II (1974), is contrasted with the sunny scenes of Sicily and the sepia tones of New York at the turn of the century. In it, Willis developed his style of lighting from above, leaving dark patches, but avoiding a muddy look, distinguishing black from even the darkest brown. Yet, Willis insisted that his cinematography was always dictated by the story. For example, the lighting of Brando "was motivated partially by Marlon's makeup and partially because Coppola wanted to open the movie in this cave-like setting, juxtaposed against the wedding outside".

The cinematographer's relationship with Allen started with "the sun-spangled vivacity that Willis brought to Annie Hall" (said the critic Pauline Kael), continuing with the richly textured black-and-white of Manhattan (1979) to the mockumentary Zelig (1983), for which Willis "aged" the film stock by scratching and marking its surface, and matched footage seamlessly with newsreels from the 1920s and 30s, and finally The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), its Depression-era setting being evoked by the film's subdued tones.

Allen got Willis to capture the quality of Gianni Di Venanzo's work on Federico Fellini's 8½ for his Felliniesque Stardust Memories (1980), and that of Sven Nykvist for his Ingmar Bergman-inspired movies Interiors (1978) and A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy (1982), later promptly dropping Willis when he got Nykvist and Carlo Di Palma, Michelangelo Antonioni's cameraman, to work with him.

Willis's last film was The Devil's Own (1997), which was also Pakula's final film before his death in 1998 in a car accident. Of his decision to retire, the laconic Willis said "I got tired of trying to get actors out of trailers, and standing in the rain."

When Willis, who used Mitchell reflex cameras and Panavision equipment, was asked a few years ago about shooting films digitally, he replied: "The organics aren't the same. The interpretive levels suffer. Digital is another form of recording an image, but it won't replace thinking."

He is survived by his wife Helen, two sons, Gordon and Timothy, a daughter, Susan, and five grandchildren.

• Gordon Hugh Willis, cinematographer, born 28 May 1931; died 18 May 2014

Ronald Bergan