(Chinese: 黃宗霑; August 28, 1899 – July 12, 1976), known professionally as James Wong Howe (Houghto), was a Chinese-born American cinematographer who worked on over 130 films.

He became an American citizen only after the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943, and due to anti-miscegenation laws, his marriage to Sanora Babb, a white woman, was not legally recognized in the state of California until 1948.

He also received Oscar nominations for Algiers (1938), Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940), Kings Row (1942), The North Star (1943), Air Force (1943), The Old Man and the Sea (1958), Seconds (1966), and Funny Lady (1975).

A Brownie camera, said to have been bought at Pasco Drug (a now-closed city landmark) when he was a child, sparked an early interest in photography.

After his father's death, the teenaged Howe moved to Oregon to live with his uncle and briefly considered (1915–16) a career as a bantamweight boxer.

After compiling a record of 5 wins, 2 losses and a draw,[3] Howe moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in hopes of attending aviation school but ran out of money and went south to Los Angeles.

After a chance encounter with a former boxing colleague who was photographing a Mack Sennett short on the streets of Los Angeles, Howe approached cinematographer Alvin Wyckoff and landed a low-level job in the film lab at Famous Players–Lasky studios.

Soon thereafter he was called to the set of The Little American to act as an extra clapper boy, which brought him into contact with silent film director Cecil B. DeMille in 1917.

Amused by the sight of the diminutive Asian holding the slate with a large cigar in his mouth, DeMille kept Howe on and launched his career as a camera assistant.

Throughout his career, Howe retained a reputation for making actresses look their best through lighting alone and seldom resorted to using gauze or other diffusion over the lens to soften their features.

The project he was working on was never completed (although some of the footage was used in Shanghai Express), and when he returned to Hollywood, he discovered that the "talkies" had largely supplanted silent productions.

To reestablish himself, Howe first co-financed a Japanese-language feature shot in Southern California entitled Chijiku wo mawasuru chikara (The Force that Turns the Earth around its Axis), which he also photographed and co-directed.

When that film failed to find an audience in California's nisei communities or Japan, Howe shot the low-budget feature Today for no salary.

Howe's broad view of a cinematographer's responsibilities reflected those established for first cameramen in silent films and continued through the studio era where most directors were also contract employees mainly in charge of actor performances.

After the end of World War II, Howe's long-term contract with Warner Bros., lapsed, and he visited China to work on a documentary about rickshaw boys.

In 1949 he shot tests and was hired for a never made comeback film starring Greta Garbo (a screen adaptation of Balzac's La Duchesse de Langeais).

In Sweet Smell of Success (1957), Howe worked with director Alexander Mackendrick to give the black-and-white film a sharp-edged look reminiscent of New York tabloid photography such as that taken by Arthur "Weegee" Fellig.

For instance, his use of fish-eye and wide-angle lenses in Seconds (1966) helped give an eerie tension to director John Frankenheimer's science fiction movie.

[citation needed] Association of Asian Pacific American Artists created the James Wong Howe Award in his honor.

[20] Later in his career, as film-stocks became faster and more sensitive, Howe continued to experiment with his photography and lighting techniques, such as shooting one scene in The Molly Maguires solely by candlelight.

Alonzo credited Howe with giving him his big break on the film Seconds as a camera operator, doing hand-held sequences during the wild party scenes with Rock Hudson.