In Memoriam — John S. Bartley, ASC, CSC (1947-2025)
The cinematographer earned acclaim for his bold approaches to such landmark series as The X-Files and Lost.
John S. Bartley, ASC, CSC, who died Aug. 17 in Los Angeles at the age of 78, didn’t see television until he was a teenager, but his career exemplified how visually expressive the medium could be. He established one of the darkest palettes on the air with his bold approach to the first three seasons of The X-Files, and he rendered mysteries of a different sort in a more colorful clime on Lost, serving as one of its directors of photography for six seasons. Both series became international sensations.
Bartley received three ASC Award nominations and two Primetime Emmy nominations for his work on The X-Files, winning the Emmy in 1996 for the episode “Grotesque.” He received additional Emmy nominations for episodes of Lost (“The Constant”) and Bates Motel (“A Danger to Himself and Others”).
Listen: John Bartley, ASC, CSC Discusses Lost on the American Cinematographer Podcast
Bartley was born in Wellington, New Zealand, on Feb. 12, 1947, to a career Army officer and a theater cashier. When his father died suddenly at age 53, 12-year-old John and his brother joined their mother at work, huddling in the ticket booth until her shift ended. The boys were often allowed to watch whatever was onstage, and musicals were a favorite. Short-wave radio provided glimpses of the world beyond Wellington. When broadcast television arrived in the city in 1960, one channel was offered. “It was movies that fascinated me,” Bartley told AC. “Cinerama was big at the time, and we took school trips to the theater.”
After high school, he apprenticed with an electrician, and at age 20, he moved to Sydney, Australia, and found work as a lighting director in theater and television. “I was really lucky,” he recalled in 2011. “I didn’t know anything about television, but two lighting technicians at the station taught me what I needed to know. Television was black-and-white in those days, and I learned how to use light to accentuate black-and-white tones … to help tell stories on television screens.” Moving to Canada two years later, he landed a job at rental house William F. White International, Inc., and started connecting with filmmakers. By 1976, he’d started freelancing as a gaffer in Vancouver. “I worked on everything from commercials to TV programs and movies with Sven Nykvist [ASC], Hiro Narita [ASC], Tak Fujimoto [ASC], Frank Tidy [BSC] and Bob Stevens [ASC],” he said. “There is no school like that.” By 1986, he was shooting commercials and music videos, and he made his feature-cinematography debut a few years later on the independent film Beyond the Stars.
As L.A. television production migrated north, Bartley became busy with MOWs and series, shooting episodes of Wiseguy and 21 Jump Street and two full seasons of The Commish, among other projects.
Then producer Robert Goodwin invited him to interview for The X-Files, and for the next three years, he was very busy indeed. “We like it dark, moody, mysterious and sometimes claustrophobic,” series creator Chris Carter told AC in 1995. Bartley noted wryly that in the show’s early days, “we didn’t have any money, and that had a lot to do with the look. Most of our sets weren’t finished; if you looked down the end of a hallway, there was nothing there, or there might be the sets of some other production, so we’d put something down there like a bright light or an object that couldn’t be identified.”
Bartley subsequently garnered acclaim for his work on multiple seasons of Lost, a thriller about plane-crash survivors stranded in the tropics, and Bates Motel, a psychological drama that imagines a backstory for Psycho’s Norman Bates. His credits also included full seasons of Roswell and Wu Assassins; the MOWs Hostage Rescue Team (directed by Andrzej Bartkowiak, ASC) and The Matthew Shepard Story; the feature Eight Legged Freaks; episodes of Vikings and Walker: Independence; and 2nd-unit cinematography on The Chronicles of Riddick and The X-Files: I Want to Believe.
Bartley became an ASC member in 1997 after being proposed by Robert Primes, Michael Watkins and Robert Stevens.
“The best advice I can give anyone is that there is nothing easy about working in this industry,” he said. “You have to love it, because it is tough on family life when you are working 70 to 80 hours a week. Not everyone can do it.”
Images courtesy of johnbartleyasc.com.
