Starlight : Roger James’ Camera Can Transform a Gasoline Station Attendant Into Humphrey Bogart or a Columnist Into Basil Rathbone

It was a rare day of gray skies at Venice Beach. Beside the Boardwalk, a man was giving a virtuoso performance of “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” on wine glasses filled with varying amounts of water. As his moistened hands slid over the rims, he cast an anxious glance upward; even a light drizzle would destroy his fine-tuning.

Skateboarders whizzed up a ramp toward the lowering clouds. Roller skaters serpented down a slalom course. A black man wearing a pink wig was lip-syncing a soprano aria from “Madama Butterfly.”

In front of one of the old Boardwalk buildings that have not yet been demolished, a young man had spread out about 20 photographs. I stopped to inspect them. With their velvety, sepia tones, they looked like 1930s and ‘40s portraits of film stars, but when I examined them, I could not recognize any of the subjects.

The man saw that I was mystified and knew why. “ I took them,” he said. His name is Roger James and he is 28. What he does is photograph quite ordinary people--a service-station attendant, a bank clerk, a nurse--and make them look like ‘30s and ‘40s movie stars.

James was slightly piqued. “I decline to categorize my pictures as ‘30s and ‘40s only: I would rather have people call them ‘high-art pictures.’ ” Neither is he flattered by comparisons of his work with that of the past masters of photography. He insists on his uniqueness as an artist. “I am not George Hurell or Cecil Beaton,” he says. “I am Roger James.”

None of James’ sitters are professional models. “I have to have full control over an individual when I take pictures,” he says. “That’s why I can’t photograph models, because models tend to take poses. And since I’m the photographer, I know where the fingers should go, and so on. I take the pose myself, and I tell my sitters to copy exactly what I do.” He also chooses what they wear--usually costumes of the ‘30s and ‘40s from a shop called Divine Madness, not far from his studio in Long Beach.

I submitted myself to the tyranny--it is no less--of Roger James and his camera. He made me put on a big-lapelled blue-serge jacket and a striped red-and-yellow tie. He set up his klieg lights and boom light, under which one feels decidedly like a Gestapo interrogatee. He pushed an armchair into the fierce glare and threw himself into it, assuming a pose that would have taxed the abilities of Houdini. “Sit like this,” he ordered. I tried, cricking my neck. “Doesn’t look right,” James said. I was told to get up, and he took another contorted posture. This time I just about managed to twist myself into the required attitude, and James took some pictures.

Then he opened the cage of his pet cockateel and made it perch on my right forefinger, with its beak one millimeter from the tip of my nose. I knew what James was after: an amusing juxtaposition of the beak and my somewhat aquiline nose. I obliged, though I had read in an old Reader’s Digest that you can contract psittacosis from getting too near the beaks of cage birds--an intimacy I had never courted before. There was a little accident with the cockateel (let us say it was not fully house-trained), but, luckily, it was the hired jacket that suffered, not mine. The photographs were brilliant. I looked something like Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes, minus the deerstalker hat. So did the cockateel.

There is little doubt that, if he wished, Roger James could be a top portrait photographer. The trouble is, he is utterly uncompromising in his intent to realize his vision of the sitter, not the sitter’s. Quite often, the resulting photographs are far from pleasing to the subject. “I don’t look like that !” is a common reaction, meaning “That’s not how I see myself.” You have to admire James’ unyielding artistic integrity, but you can’t help feeling that if he could compromise just a little and put himself in the hands of a good agent or manager (he turned down an offer from one well- known agent), he could have the success that would bring his work to a less select audience. In the meantime, if you are prepared to pay $200 and surrender yourself to the Jamesian tyranny without any demur, you will see yourself transformed into a ‘30s or ‘40s star--even if it turns out to be Boris Karloff.

James, frankly, could do with the big money that success might bring. His studio is the room in which he lives. He drives a beaten-up Volkswagen van. He has had a hard life. The son of an American serviceman and a Filipino woman, he was born in Pampanga, about 60 miles from Manila. In high school he was larger and whiter than most of his Filipino schoolfellows, who victimized him for being different.

“Five little guys would attack me at the same time. The only boys who were treated worse were the sons of black American servicemen.” When James was 16, his mother gave him $75 and an air ticket to San Francisco. He knew no one in America except an aunt in Phoenix, whose house he managed to reach. She found him work as a dishwasher at Luke Air Force Base in Glendale, Ariz., and since then, James has had a number of casual and poorly paid jobs.

The photography began when a friend lent him a 35mm Nikon camera. James found that, without any training, his photographs came out different from those of other photographers. The pictures’ strong chiaroscuro, their pearly highlights and dramatic shadows, gave his sitters a distinction that might not be apparent in their everyday lives. His friend Maria Mendez, a bank clerk in Pasadena, emerged as a sultry diva. Eric Williams, a Long Beach gasoline station attendant, had a look of Humphrey Bogart under the brim of a trilby hat from the James properties box. Linda Nagoles, a furniture-store manager in Santa Monica, was the image of Bette Davis when the star was young. Emily Icuna, a kindergarten teacher in Glendale, was transformed into a voluptuous temptress, a Salome or Delilah or Mata Hari. “What fascinates me, when I look at these pictures,” their creator says, “are the expressions. ‘How did I put her into that mood?’ I wonder. ‘What did I do to make her look so pensive?’ And then I think back to the reality: This girl is just a next-door type; yet in this picture she looks like Garbo.” James adds: “I don’t want to photograph celebrities. I turn people into celebrities.”