James Wong Howe was born on August 28, 1899. Howe was a cinematographer who made several important innovations in movie photography during a career that lasted for more than 50 years.

Howe was born in China, and shortly after his birth, his father left for America to work on the railroads in the Pacific Northwest. The rest of the family joined him when Howe was 5. The family ran a general store in Pasco, Washington. Howe first became interested in photography as a child, when he was given a Brownie camera, one of Kodak’s first portable cameras.

In his late teens, Howe moved to Los Angeles, where he got a job in the film lab of one of the silent film studios. He was called to a film set one day to serve as a clapper boy. Director Cecil B. DeMille took a liking to Howe, and kept him on set as a camera assistant.

During these first few years in Los Angeles, Howe was earning extra money by taking publicity stills of actors. One of his challenges was that the film in use at the time didn’t photograph blue eyes very well; they tended to wash out and look extremely pale. While shooting stills of Mary Miles Minter, a major star of the day, he accidentally discovered that if she was looking at a dark surface while he photographed her, the light would reflect from that surface in a way that helped her eyes to photograph better. Minter was so impressed with Howe’s photographs that she insisted that he be the cinematographer on her next film.

While shooting that film, 1923’s Drums of Fate, Howe refined the technique by placing a black velvet frame around the camera for Minter’s closeups. The results made Howe one of Hollywood’s most popular cinematographers for the rest of the silent era. Sadly, most of the silent films he worked on have been lost. The 1924 Peter Pan has survived; it’s the first film version of the story, with an early performance from Anna May Wong as Tiger Lily. As is often true when watching films from this era, it is a terribly stereotypical representation of a Native American “princess,” and the casting of a Chinese-American actress in the role wouldn’t be acceptable today, either.

As Hollywood made the transition from silent films to talkies, many actors found it difficult to make the transition. The people who worked offscreen had similar problems, and Howe struggled to find work for a few years. When he did begin to be hired to work on sound films, he returned to making technical breakthroughs. The 1931 film Transatlantic isn’t very well known or often seen today, but in it, Howe did some of the earliest work in deep-focus cinematography, which allowed objects close to the camera and objects further from the camera to both remain in focus. A decade later, Citizen Kane would get much of the credit for making the deep-focus breakthrough, but Howe had laid the groundwork.

Howe continued to work steadily throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, earning his first Oscar nomination for Algiers in 1938. The short documentary How Hollywood Does It: Cinematography focuses on Algiers and Howe’s innovations in moving camera techniques. Other notable work from this period includes The Thin Man, Yankee Doodle Dandy, and uncredited shooting of the live-action orchestral sequences in Disney’s Fantasia.

In 1937, Howe married the novelist Sanora Babb in Paris. At the time California did not legally recognize interracial marriages, and the morals clauses in Howe’s studio contracts meant that could not publicly acknowledge the marriage. His own morality would not allow him to live with a woman to whom he wasn’t legally married, so for several years Howe and Babb lived in separate apartments in the same building. They were finally married in California in 1948 when the state’s courts overturned its anti-miscegenation laws. Even then, it took them three days to find a judge who would perform the ceremony.

After World War II, Howe went through another difficult few years in the early phase of the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Hollywood blacklist. While he had never been a communist himself, Babb had been. His Chinese ancestry and her former political affiliation were enough to get Howe gray-listed, and he worked relatively little in the late 1940s and early 1950s. When he did work, though, he kept on finding new ways to shoot scenes; for the boxing scenes in 1947’s Body and Soul, Howe went into the ring on roller skates, filming with a handheld camera, still something of a novelty at the time.

By the mid-1950s, his career was picking up again, and Howe continued to innovate. For 1955’s Picnic, he planned (working with his assistant Haskell Wexler, who went on to an impressive career of his own) one of the earliest helicopter shots; the same year, he won his first Academy Award, for The Rose Tattoo. By now, Howe was so highly regarded in Hollywood that some directors publicly acknowledged that they focused their attention on the actors, and left almost all of the filming decisions to Howe.

Having already survived the transition from silent films to talkies, Howe now faced the transition from black-and-white to color, an even larger challenge for a photographer. He proved equally capable in both, with another Oscar nomination (in color) for 1958’s The Old Man and the Sea, and his second win (in black-and-white) for 1963’s Hud.

In the final decade of his career, Howe’s innovations included his skillful use of wide-angle and fish-eye lenses in the 1966 paranoid thriller Seconds (another Academy Award nominee). He continued to explore his career-long interest in limited, dramatic lighting in 1970’s The Molly Maguires, filming one scene entirely by candellight. His final film was 1975’s Funny Lady.

Howe died on July 12, 1976. He had filmed more than 130 movies, and received ten Academy Award nominations, winning twice. He was the first minority cinematographer admitted to the American Society of Cinematographers and worked in the last half of his career to provide encouragement and mentorship to other minorities in the profession.

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