Take My Picture, Jeff Bridges!

His startling wide-angle photos of everything from Michelle Pfeiffer to hurricane-force White Squall winds reveal another side of the famed actor.

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Jeff Bridges smiles at the memory of his first camera, a Nikon "stole" from his famous father Lloyd, who Bridges says ever seemed to miss it." By the time he discovered photography, he had already joined the family business, having appeared in his first film when he was six months old and acted in a few episodes of his dad's TV series Sea Hunt before he was 10. But he understood even as a child the difference between acting id photography. Acting was "serious," he says. Taking photographs was what he learned to do relax, especially on a movie set, between takes.

With his first coffee-table book of photographs, Pictures, just released by powerHouse books, Bridges's between-takes hobby makes a big leap forward. Included are more scenic images from the sets, as well as revealing portraits of the stars, everyone from Francis Ford Coppola to Barbra Streisand, Lauren Bacall to Tobey Maguire, Jane Fonda to the Coen brothers. "It helps to distract me," he says, "so I'm not thinking too much about acting. Some guys like to knit sweaters, or read magazines, or play chess. I carry a camera around."

Bridges says he "fell in love with the idea of taking pictures at an early age," and by the time he was 16, he was even developing them himself. While his friends were out playing ball or surfing, Bridges found comfort in a home darkroom, red light overhead, tweaking his images of birds and rocks as they emerged in their solution. Hours would go by as he listened to music and got excited to see the results of what he had snapped. "They sit in a box, these cans of undeveloped film," he says, "and then you start to process them--it's like opening a Christmas present. You say, 'Oh gosh, look at that, I forgot about that!"

Having appeared in 52 films and been nominated for four Oscars, he appreciates the way a photograph differs from how one appears in a film. "In a movie you are a moving target; photographs freeze you," he says. Like the one he took in 1993 on the set of Hot Shots! Part Deux, a film his father was appearing in on his 80th birthday. The younger Bridges wasn't in that movie but wanted to come see his father swing from a chandelier for one scene. The photograph he took with his favored Widelux camera was the moment before Lloyd Bridges went into action. "That's a favorite picture of mine because it reminds me of what a game player my dad was, how he used to love to do all these kind of fight scenes."

Another favorite is one of Streisand on The Mirror Has Two Faces. Streisand has a reputation for controlling her image, and Bridges respected that. "I asked if she would mind if I took pictures. I told her she could look through all the pictures, and if she sees any she doesn't like I wouldn't use it in the book, so she said okay. I even handed her the camera a couple of times."

The "books" he's talking about are the gifts he gives to the crew at the completion of a shoot--a photographic record of the filming. He's done 13 such books, beginning with Starman, when his costar Karen Allen saw him taking pictures and suggested collecting them would make a nice memory. (Ten of these books can be seen at the Rose Gallery at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica.) "I don't know if I'll ever direct," Bridges says, "but these are like little home movies. It's very much about framing and making subjects feel comfortable, which is what a director does."

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