Carl Gregory

Biography

Pioneering cinematographer Carl Louis Gregory was born in Walnut, KS, in 1882. He and his family moved to Ohio, where, at age 11 he became interested in photography and made his own camera using a cigar box and a lens made from a pair of eyeglasses. While a student at a Cleveland high school he began earning a living taking photographs, and made enough money from that business to pay his tuition at Ohio State University. He also studied at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Columbia University. In 1905, a year after graduating from OSU, he opened a photography studio with branches in Cleveland, Colorado Springs (CO), San Antonio (TX) and even Monterrey, Mexico. He soon sold those businesses and went to work for the US Department of the Interior as an official photographer. A few years later he was hired by a wealthy businessman as a projectionist for slides and film that were shown during the man's lectures. In 1909 he joined the Edison Co. as a cameraman and director and turned out quite a few films at the company's New Jersey studios in Orange and Bedford Park. He even went to Cuba to shoot features and short educational films. He joined the Thanhouser Co. in 1910 as a cameraman/photographer and later became the studio's chief cameraman, shooting many of its films and supervising cinematographers on other projects. Renowned for his trick photography and seamless use of double-exposures, he was often mentioned whenever newspapers or magazines wrote about the technical aspects of the relatively new film business. In 1913 he was placed in charge of the studio's prestigious Princess Films division; in addition to the day-to-day operation of the unit, he also shot films and wrote screenplays. He so impressed the powers-that-be at Thanhouser that he was promoted from the Princess Films division and placed in charge of the company's major, big-budget productions. He was the cinematographer for the Williamson brothers when they shot their groundbreaking underwater productions in the West Indies in 1914, and apparently liked it so much that he worked on quite a few similar projects, gaining even more renown for his expertise in that genre. In 1914 he and a company of actors traveled to Yellowstone National Park, among other places, to shoot a series of outdoor films for Thanhouser. Gregory left Thanhouser in 1915 for Metro Pictures. He also became a respected lecturer on the subject of film photography, making the rounds of various professional photographic societies. In 1917 he traveled to Florida to do some work for the Technicolor Corp. He contributed to the war effort by being the chief cinematography instructor for the US Army's Signal Corps School of Photography, and wrote a book for cameramen, "Motion Picture Photography". After the war he became a photography instructor at Columbia University and was named Dean of Photography at the New York Institute of Photography. He still kept his hand in the business, however, directing and photographing Love's Flame (1920) for Fidelity Pictures. He became involved with several companies that shot films in virtually all corners of the world, including Japan, China, Burma, Malaya and the Philippines. He was the cinematographer on one of the first films to be made in Hawaii, The Thirteenth Girl (1915), which was shot on Hilo. He worked for the Kislyn Color Corp., which was trying to develop a color process invented by photographer Louis Berthon. In the 1940s he was employed by the National Archives, and was the first person to try restoring some very early films that were shot on paper prints. He died on March 11, 1951, at his Van Nuys, CA, home of complications from arteriosclerosis.