This past summer at his home in Paris, the legendary cinematography Henri Alekan died at age ninety-two, leaving behind one of the most distinctive bodies of work in the history of the medium. In a career that spanned some sixty-five years, Alekan photographed nearly a hundred feature films and more than fifty documentaries and dramas for television. He began work during the silent era as an assistant cameraman and operator in the French studio system and became a protégé of the innovative German cinematographer Eugene Shuftan. During the German occupation, his work shifted to shooting anti-Nazi films as part of the Resistance in the south of France, a service that earned him the Legion of Honor. The broad range of his creative work emerged in the immediate postwar years when Alekan worked on such diverse productions as Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast in France, an adaptation of Anna Karenina in England, and William Wyler’s Roman Holiday in Hollywood. Alekan would continue an active career into his eighties and earned his greatest recognition for his work on Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire, when he was seventy-eight years old. Several lifetime achievement awards followed as the great master of light and shadow ended a singular career behind the camera.