James Wong Howe

Born Wong Tung Jim in Guangdong, China, he came to the American Pacific Northwest as a boy, growing up in a small Washington town where his father ran a store. Short, scrappy, and drawn to boxing, he made his way to Los Angeles and took a job cleaning up around a film studio, eventually talking his way onto a camera crew. He got his first real break shooting Mary Miles Minter, reportedly by figuring out how to make her pale eyes register darker on film.

Over a career spanning more than half a century and some 130 films, Howe became famous for low-key, high-contrast lighting and for placing the camera exactly where the drama lived. He fought against the flat, evenly lit house style of the studios, favoring deep shadow, hard sourcelight, and a mobile camera that moved with the actors. For the boxing scenes of "Body and Soul" he had himself pushed into the ring on roller skates, holding a handheld camera, so the audience would reel with the fighters.

He worked constantly across every genre, from the swirling romance of "The Prisoner of Zenda" to the sweaty naturalism of Depression dramas, and shot the acid nighttime cityscapes of "Sweet Smell of Success," a film whose glittering, predatory New York is inseparable from his lens. He earned Academy Awards for the lush black-and-white of "The Rose Tattoo" and the sun-bleached, dust-blown Texas of "Hud," a landscape as stark and honest as the story.

Howe built this career against real prejudice. Anti-Asian laws long barred him from citizenship and even complicated his marriage to the writer Sanora Babb. Yet he was regarded within the industry as a consummate professional and a demanding perfectionist whose respect younger crews prized. He kept working into the 1970s, closing his career with the period drama "Funny Lady," and died in 1976, remembered as living proof that the eye behind the camera could belong to anyone with the vision to command it.