Richard Leacock, who went to school with the Flaherty's daughters and later worked as the cinematographer on "Louisiana Story", says that Flaherty taught him to concentrate on finding images: “You look, you search. You think of the image not merely as a way of showing something but also as a way of withholding information, of creating tension in the viewer. Of not revealing too much. Of seeing things with different perspectives by using different focal-length lenses.” Flaherty says he owes almost everything to these long lenses and with them captured some of the most memorable sea footage ever recorded. Corliss says "Man of Aran" was very different from his earlier work, “…the chiaroscuro compositions, charcoal rock, black-clad figures against a gray sky, are light-years removed from the natural grandeur of "Nanook of the North" or the easy elegance of "Moana". Corliss suggests there are enough similarities between Flaherty and John Ford, Chaplin, Borzage, even Disney that place him firmly in a tradition of the romantic visionary American. Winston sees the influence of Flaherty in Leni Riefenstahl films, arguing that her aesthetics of manipulation owed much to his pioneering work. McLoon goes further, suggesting “the cult of beauty, and fetishism of courage” in "Man of Aran" are the tropes of Fascism. He goes on to exonerate Flaherty of any Nazi connection saying “it is a measure of the apolitical nature of Flaherty’s vision that he was unaware of this problem inherent in his nineteenth-century primitive sensibility.”