For ‘True Grit’ Star Jeff Bridges, Photography Has Been a Life-Long Passion

On the set of ‘Crazy Heart.’ Photo by Jeff Bridges.

For a long time, Jeff Bridges was hailed by critics as one of the most underrated actors in Hollywood. But then he won an Academy Award for his turn as burnt-out country singer Bad Blake in Crazy Heart, and now he’s earning praise again for his role as crotchety U.S. Marshal Rooster Cogburn in True Grit. Yet Bridges has another talent that may be as unrecognized as his acting once was — photography.

Born into Hollywood royalty, Bridges, 58, has been on film sets for a good majority of his life. But it was in high school where he discovered his passion for photography, a craft he would develop over the years and use as yet another outlet for his creativity.

“It gets boring doing one thing,” Bridges once told USA Today. “And I get restless. I like to jump from acting to music to the camera. If I’m not creating something, I get tired of myself.”

With his ancient Widelux panoramic camera, Bridges has photographed backstage on over 50 movie sets throughout his career, capturing candid images of actors and crew not accessible to outsiders — from Crazy Heart to True Grit, and from King Kong (in which he played – surprise – a photographer) to the tense, behind-the-scenes atmosphere of an unfinished script on Iron Man.

Throughout his career, Bridges has demonstrated that acting and photography have quite a bit in common, namely the need to be able to recognize and acknowledge human emotion. On screen and in his photos, Bridges’ work is powerful, yet reserved. Emotional, yet stoic.

Lucky for fans, Bridges has collected all his best pictures into the 2003 book Pictures: Photographs by Jeff Bridges. Check out some of them on his website. And if you have time, sign his guest book and ask him to drop by Silber Studios for a chat.