Lee Garmes

Lee Garmes was born in Peoria, Illinois, and entered the movie business in its scrappy 1910s youth, working as a painter and assistant before graduating to the camera. By the arrival of sound he was among the most gifted image-makers in Hollywood, with a signature approach he called "north light," borrowed from painters, that lit faces softly from above and behind to sculpt them out of shadow.

His most celebrated partnership was with director Josef von Sternberg, and above all with their shared muse, Marlene Dietrich. On "Morocco" and especially "Shanghai Express," Garmes helped invent the very idea of Dietrich as a screen goddess, veiling her in nets of shadow, feathers, and gauze, catching her cheekbones in gleaming highlight. His work on "Shanghai Express" won him the Academy Award and remains a benchmark of glamorous black-and-white photography, a whole visual philosophy built around one luminous face.

Garmes was versatile and much in demand. He shot the delicate, almost surreal "Zoo in Budapest," contributed to the early reels of "Gone with the Wind" before its production upheavals replaced him, and photographed a wide range of dramas across several decades. Restless and independent-minded, he occasionally tried his hand at producing and directing, and he moved easily between prestige studio pictures and grittier independent fare.

Later in his career he lent his elegance to films like the sun-scorched Western "Duel in the Sun" and continued working into the 1960s. Fellow cinematographers regarded him as a true artist of light, generous with knowledge and endlessly curious about technique. He died in 1978, remembered as one of the men who taught Hollywood how to make a human face glow, and whose collaborations with Sternberg and Dietrich still define what audiences picture when they imagine the silver screen at its most seductive.