A master of both evocative black-and-white interiors and exhilarating color landscapes, Lucien Ballard found the art in cinematography. "I want to contribute to a picture, not just work on it," he once said. "I'm their man if they want more than a cameraman."

Ballard (1908-1988), who was part Cherokee Indian, was born in Oklahoma and educated at the Universities of Oklahoma and Pennsylvania. He began working in films as a cutter, and served as an assistant cameraman to noted cinematographer Lee Garmes on Josef von Sternberg's Morocco (1930), starring Marlene Dietrich. Von Sternberg was sufficiently impressed to make Ballard co-photographer on The Devil Is a Woman (1935), another Dietrich vehicle for Paramount; and director of photography on Crime and Punishment (1935), which von Sternberg made for Columbia Pictures.

After a tenure at Columbia that also included Craig's Wife (1936), Ballard moved to 20th Century Fox beginning with The Undying Monster in 1942. While shooting The Lodger (1944) he married the star of the film, Merle Oberon. To flatter his bride, who had sustained facial scars in a near-fatal car crash in 1937, Ballard created a special spotlight that reduces lines and unwanted shadows. The device, usually mounted next to the camera, was nicknamed "The Obie." Ballard would photograph Oberon in four other films including This Love of Ours (1945) and Berlin Express (1948). The couple divorced in 1949.

Ballard's other films for Fox ranged from the Marilyn Monroe melodrama Don't Bother to Knock (1952) to the World War II drama The Desert Rats (1953) and the swashbuckler Prince Valiant (1954). With young Fox stars Robert Wagner and Joanne Woodward, he shot the suspense thriller A Kiss Before Dying (1956) for United Artists.

Ballard won special praise for his gritty black-and-white photography for Stanley Kubrick's breakthrough film, the film noir crime thriller The Killing (1956), and became an important collaborator with such other adventurous directors as Budd Boetticher (Buchanan Rides Alone, 1958; A Time for Dying, 1969) and Sam Peckinpah (Ride the High Country, 1962; The Wild Bunch, 1969).

Ballard shot six films for director Tom Gries, including The Hawaiians (1970), a sequel to Hawaii (1966) based on the same epic novel by James Michener and starring Charlton Heston; Will Penny (1968), a low-key character study also starring Heston as an aging cowhand, and Breakheart Pass (1975), a Charles Bronson Western adapted for the screen by Alistair MacLean from his novel, with Idaho landscapes doubling for Nevada in Ballard's sweeping cinematography.

In his later years, in fact, Ballard seemed to specialize in the Western genre, capturing the lighting, weather and landscapes of the frontier in such films as Nevada Smith (1966) with Steve McQueen in the starring role, The Sons of Katie Elder (1965) starring John Wayne, and Hour of the Gun (1967), John Sturges' revisionist version of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral.

Oddly, Ballard was nominated for an Oscar® only once, for his black-and-white work on The Caretakers (1963). He did, however, win the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Cinematography for The Wild Bunch. His final film was Boetticher's documentary about Portuguese Lusitano and Spanish Andalusian horses, My Kingdom For... (1985). Ballard died in a California road accident on October 1, 1988.

by Roger Fristoe