The big picture show

Actor Jeff Bridges has been shooting on-set photographs for decades. Steve Fairclough spoke to him about his new book and his passion for photography

- Steve Fairclough

For almost 50 years moviestar Jeff Bridges has been at the top of his profession, garnering seven Academy Award nominations and winning the 2009 Best Actor Oscar for his performance as an ageing country singer in Crazy Heart. Yet throughout much of this period Bridges has also been pursuing his passion for photography by shooting on-set pictures with his beloved 35mm Widelux F8 panoramic camera.

The second book of Bridges’ on-set photography was published in October 2019 and it spans films he has made since 2003 – the likes of Seabiscuit, Iron Man, Tron: Legacy, True Grit, Hell or High Water and Crazy Heart.

Jeff Bridges: Pictures, Volume 2 features dozens of his images, which range from true candids to posed tragedia/comedia pictures, where the long shutter span of the camera allows the subject to go from one side of the frame to the other to pull two different faces.

Bridges’ ongoing fascination with shooting on-set images was sparked by his co-star Karen Allen on the set of the 1984 movie Starman. She suggested to him to combine the images he’d been shooting with those of unit photographer Sid Baldwin into a photo book for the cast and crew of the movie… and that’s exactly what he did. Now, over 30 years later, he’s still doing it.

Teenage interest in photography

His initial interest in photography dates back to his teenage years, ‘When I was about 15 or so I kind of took my father’s 35mm Nikon camera and would shoot pictures of my friends and so forth. I made a little darkroom in my bathroom, got an enlarger and did all that kind of stuff. So I got into it around that age.’