To return to Mr. de Mille’s analogy, lighting is like music: for with identically the same resources at hand, no two artists work the same way, even though their results may in the end prove all but identical. So, too, cinematographic lighting has its Mozarts and its Wagners—its artists who specialize in light, delicate tones, and others who prefer the sweeping effect, the crashing crescendo…
This, in turn, necessitates the intrusion of the personal pronoun. If I do a thing one way, it does not follow that it is what John Seitz, or Karl Struss, or George Barnes would do. It does not follow that my way is the only way: it is simply the method that my experience and my personal inclinations suggest…
Personally I have always felt that the problem of lighting is generally approached from the wrong angle. Instead of approaching any given set or action with the one question, “How shall I light this?” I prefer to approach it with the thought of “What compositions can I make with this set and this action?” Then I proceed to make those compositions—and the lighting automatically takes care of itself.
Notes from Chinese-American film pioneer James Wong Howe on the art of lighting
Cinematographic Annual, Vol. 2, 1931
Today’s (May 25) Google Doodle honors James Wong Howe, who was born in Canton in 1899. He came to the United States in 1904, following his father, who had come, like so many laborers, to work on a transcontinental railroad line.
Howe established himself as a cameraman during cinema’s early silent era and became, through the 1930s and 40s, one of the industry’s preeminent cinematographers. He was barred from U.S. citizenship until the 1943 repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act and from legally wedding his wife under longstanding miscegenation laws. He and his wife also came under HUAC scrutiny for suspected Communist ties, but his reputation and work withstood—Howe remained prolific until his death in 1976 and was, by then, a ten-time Academy Award nominee.