Jeff Bridges’ devotion to the Widelux goes beyond nostalgia — it’ became’s a resurrection. After decades of championing the camera, he helped inspire a small American startup, WideLux New, to bring it back to life.
The plan was bold: recreate the panoramic magic using original blueprints and modern machining. But fate, in true cinematic irony, intervened — the Japanese factory that once produced Widelux cameras burned down in 2021, taking with it irreplaceable tooling and molds.
Still, the spirit of the camera refuses to die. Bridges and a community of panoramic obsessives have since backed efforts to reverse-engineer the mechanism, blending 3D printing with traditional craftsmanship. A new generation of photographers may soon experience that unmistakable whirrrr — proof that even in an age of AI, there’s still room for a camera that moves like a heartbeat.
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The Widelux: The Swinging Eye of the World
In a world obsessed with megapixels and mirrorless convenience, there’s one camera that still makes even hardened photographers stop mid-sentence: the Widelux. With its humming motor, curved film plane, and spinning lens, this mid-century panoramic oddball captures not just images — but moments that feel alive, stretched, and slightly surreal.
A Mechanical Ballet
Unlike most cameras that stare straight ahead, the Widelux sweeps. Inside its sleek metal body, a 26mm lens pivots 140 degrees across a curved strip of 35mm film, exposing it in a single fluid swing that lasts barely a second. The effect is unmistakable: buildings bow, faces elongate, and time itself seems to bend across the frame.
Developed by Panon Camera in Japan in the 1950s, the Widelux F6 and its successors, the F7 and F8, became cult objects among photojournalists, architects, and artists who loved their unpredictable distortions. It’s mechanical to the core — no batteries, no electronics — just gears, springs, and the hypnotic whir of that rotating lens.
The Camera of Outsiders
If the Leica was the darling of war correspondents, the Widelux was the sidearm of the misfits. Stan Kubrick used one between takes on Dr. Strangelove. Jeff Bridges has made it his lifelong companion, publishing entire books of Widelux images taken on film sets and behind the scenes. “It captures what it feels like to be there,” Bridges once said — and he wasn’t exaggerating.
The Widelux doesn’t just record space; it records movement. People crossing the frame become smeared ghosts if they shift mid-sweep. Lines curve and floors tilt, as though the camera itself were slightly drunk on the experience of seeing.
How It Works — and Misbehaves
Technically, the Widelux is both brilliant and finicky. The rotating slit shutter can jam or stutter if the camera hasn’t been serviced, causing “banding” — uneven exposures that look like ghostly stripes across your photo. But for many users, that’s part of the charm. Every shot is a roll of the dice, and no digital filter can replicate its analog swagger.
The field of view is roughly equivalent to a 17mm lens, but with a curve that gives each image a cinematic sweep. Point it straight and you’ll get a stately panorama. Tilt it, and you can make the horizon loop like a roller coaster.
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Why Photographers Still Love It
Despite its quirks, or perhaps because of them, the Widelux has never gone out of style. In an age when most cameras try to make photography invisible — point, click, perfect — the Widelux insists on being seen and heard. It’s tactile. It’s loud. It’s weirdly alive.
Photographers use it today for landscapes, street scenes, and portraits that break the mold. It’s not a camera that flatters or forgives; it exposes everything — including the photographer’s hand in the process.
A Panoramic Legacy
Collectors still hunt the Widelux on auction sites, and repair technicians treat its curved gears with near-religious reverence. There’s talk of revivals — digital panoramics that nod to its design — but the truth is, the Widelux doesn’t need reinvention. It already perfected its own niche: the honest distortion of human vision.
The world doesn’t stand still, and neither does the Widelux.
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Jeff Bridges and the Widelux Eye: A Review of Pictures and Pictures Volume Two
Jeff Bridges doesn’t just make movies — he makes memories curve. Across two extraordinary volumes, Pictures (2004) and Pictures Volume Two (2019), the Oscar-winning actor offers a panoramic diary of Hollywood from within, taken through the lens of his beloved Widelux F8 — a mechanical marvel that captures a 140° sweep of the world in one hypnotic swing.
These are not glossy publicity stills or paparazzi snapshots. They are, as Bridges himself puts it, “pictures of friends at work.” And that’s the secret to their power.
Pictures (2004): The Quiet Between Takes
The first volume, published by powerHouse Books with a foreword by Peter Bogdanovich, feels like stumbling onto a secret world — the sacred downtime between “Action!” and “Cut!” The photographs, often blurred at the edges or stretched by the Widelux’s curved field, pulse with the rhythm of filmmaking itself.
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We see Michelle Pfeiffer, Robin Williams, Tommy Lee Jones — all caught off-guard and utterly human. The cinematic glamour dissolves into something intimate: weary faces, cigarette breaks, laughter under stage lights. Bridges’ handwritten captions scrawl across the pages like a director’s notebook — personal, unpolished, and endearingly honest.
Bogdanovich calls the images “a vision of Hollywood that only an insider with an outsider’s eye could capture.” That’s exactly what they are — visual jazz riffs from a man who understands performance yet never stops watching it from the wings.
The book is also a gesture of generosity: Bridges donated all proceeds to the Motion Picture & Television Fund, a quiet nod to the community that raised him.
Pictures Volume Two (2019): The Long View
Sixteen years later, Volume Two arrives like the second act of a life story — deeper, wiser, and even more panoramic. With a foreword by Kerry Brougher, it gathers scenes from True Grit, Crazy Heart, The Giver, TRON: Legacy, and Hell or High Water. Bridges’ eye hasn’t dulled; if anything, his touch is more assured.
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He uses the Widelux like a philosopher with a camera — aware that time isn’t linear, that every take is both a rehearsal and a farewell. The curved frame pulls you into the set itself: makeup artists bending over actors, grips moving silently in the half-light, a moment of stillness before the next illusion begins.
The panoramic distortion becomes metaphor. In Bridges’ hands, it mirrors the distortion of fame — the way the camera stretches and compresses reality until the ordinary becomes mythic. He’s photographing Hollywood the way it really feels to live inside it: warped, luminous, slightly dreamlike.
Once again, all proceeds go to the Motion Picture & Television Fund, grounding this dreamy, generous project in gratitude.
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A Legacy in Motion
Together, these books chart not only a visual history of modern filmmaking but also a personal one. They’re as much about Bridges’ evolution — from actor to auteur to philosopher-with-a-Widelux — as they are about cinema itself.
The images are raw, grainy, panoramic acts of empathy. In a medium built on illusion, Bridges gives us the truth: the waiting, the weariness, the camaraderie, and the quiet poetry of making art as a team.
For collectors, both volumes are essential companions — twin artifacts from a golden age of analog Hollywood, bound by the whir of a Widelux lens and the eye of a man who never stopped being curious.
Links
Widelux website
Silvergrain classics website
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