Jeff Bridges made these photographs from within the working world of cinema. For more than three decades, he carried a Widelux F8 panoramic camera onto film sets, turning intervals in production, assembled crews, performers, costumes, constructed environments, and technical labor into the subject of a sustained photographic practice. Published by powerHouse Books in 2019, Jeff Bridges: Pictures Volume Two gathers images from his more recent films, sixteen years after his first collection appeared.
The book’s distinction lies in the position from which Bridges photographs. He is neither a visiting documentarian nor a conventional publicity photographer, but a participant looking closely at his coworkers and the elaborate machinery surrounding them. Meryl Streep, Robert Duvall, Julianne Moore, Olivia Wilde, and Matt Damon appear among a much larger community of directors, makeup artists, costumers, set decorators, art departments, and crews. Productions including True Grit, Crazy Heart, The Giver, TRON: Legacy, and Hell or High Water provide the changing settings.
Bridges’s panoramic camera is more than a means of widening the frame. The Widelux permits distinctive optical effects and accommodates several simultaneous centers of activity, making it particularly suited to the collective choreography of filmmaking. Across the book, celebrated faces share space with tools, scenery, waiting, preparation, and the collaborative work normally kept beyond the finished film. The resulting pictures describe cinema as both illusion and workplace: an art assembled through craft, timing, and many forms of specialized attention.
For collectors of photography and film culture, the volume merits consideration as an extended, participant-made record of contemporary moviemaking and as a substantial example of panoramic practice. Its value as a photobook rests on that conjunction: unusual access, a consistent camera, and sustained attention to both visible stars and less visible labor. Bridges’s proceeds from the book were designated for the Motion Picture & Television Fund, further connecting the publication to the professional community it depicts.
