They've got the look -- and a ability to look deeper

Being a movie star is unbelievably boring.

No, honestly, it's true.

Think about what the job entails.

Yes, you get to go to premieres and not have to wait to be seated in restaurants, and Barbara Walters pretends to be your friend before millions of people. But that accounts for about as much of the time spent being a movie star as, say, the senior prom does being a high school student.

No, movie stardom mostly means sitting around in a trailer waiting for the next scene to be lit.

Fortunately, movie stars long ago arrived at any number of ways to keep themselves occupied: sex, drugs, day-trading, to name just three. Even the most cursory glance at that legendary catalog of debauchery, "Hollywood Babylon," will confirm the popularity of the first two, and the fluctuation of property values in Beverly Hills and Bel-Air attests to the appeal of the third.

Another movie-star pastime may not be as widely indulged in on location as affairs or pill-popping, but it has nonetheless attracted a surprising number of enthusiasts: photography.

Actually, it makes perfect sense that people whose occupation is being photographed should feel an urge to turn the camera around and do the shooting themselves.

Jeff Bridges's recent coffee-table book, "Pictures," is only the latest instance. Other stars who've published collections of their photography include Roddy McDowall, Gina Lollobrigida (no fewer than five), Diane Keaton, Dennis Hopper, and Viggo Mortensen. And "Candice Bergen Photographs: 1971-76" just concluded a run at George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y.

As one might gather from the Bergen show's presence at so prestigious a venue, there can be real substance in the work of these celebrity photographers.

The star portraits in McDowall's "Double Exposure" (1966) are so intent on adulation that they make you wonder if a very young Tina Brown wasn't his darkroom assistant. Yet that very worshipfulness means that when McDowall really connects with a subject -- as with a pensive Barbra Streisand, almost lost in shadow, or a sweetly wary Giuletta Masina -- the results can be memorable. An evangelist, after all, is only as good as his god (or goddess).

For "Reservations" (1980), Keaton photographed details of empty hotel lobbies. The results are both charming and eerie (Annie Hall visits "The Shining"). Who would've thought decor and anomie could have so much in common?

Most impressive of all is Hopper, whose "Out of the Sixties" (1986) has real value as a document of those years of upheaval. Hollywood, Pop Art, Haight-Ashbury, the civil rights movement, the rock scene: Hopper and his camera had a Zelig-like ability to turn up where the action was. No one has better captured Andy Warhol's matter-of-fact creepiness, and Hopper's shot of Warhol, David Hockney, and the curator Henry Geldzahler is a minor classic of group portraiture.

Bridges differs from his photographic peers in having filmmaking as an overriding concern. Most of the images in "Pictures" show movie sets and movie people. Clearly, he's one star who's wasted little time being bored in his trailer.

"Taking pictures on movie sets exposes a bit of the magic; it unmasks things that were never meant to be seen," he writes. "Peeking behind the curtain is fascinating, but I am also ambivalent about revealing too much -- showing how the `rabbit is pulled out of the hat.' I do know that it's impossible to expose the real magic. The real magic is too deep, and the deeper you dig, the deeper it gets."

A melancholy abides in the space between the presence of magic and the knowledge that it can be only partially revealed. That melancholy presents itself as an unfillable emptiness (Keaton's evacuated lobbies can appear almost cheery by comparison). That sense of absence translates into what the director Peter Bogdanovich, in his introduction to "Pictures," describes as "in the midst of turmoil, a particular sort of loneliness."

Heightening that loneliness is Bridges's use of a Widelux panoramic camera. Even in his portraits, there's a sense of great space. It's an effect the Widelux achieves through the use of a panning lens. This means that given the right timing, a dual portrait of the same person can be taken within the same shot. Bridges is fond of having colleagues offer their own versions of the masks of comedy and tragedy in the same image: Here's Michelle Pfeiffer or John Turturro or Kevin Spacey, both smiling and frowning.

It's appropriate that something so explicitly actorish should be the predominant motif in "Pictures." For Bridges the photographer very much recalls Bridges the performer: solid, unemphatic, quietly intelligent. Stardom is even more about being than doing. So at times is photography, at least as practiced in Hollywood.

Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.