.... was / is the title of my most extensive work (actually my thesis at the Karl-Franzens Universität in Graz). My interest in the Southern literature and photography did not end with the completion of that extensive work....so, here's a little something about a famous photographer of the South...
Walker
Evans’s early documentary photographs of poverty in the South during
the Great Depression captured the public’s attention—even altering the
way many Americans saw their country—and helped define his 46-year
career. Yet his little–known works produced in the ensuing decades are
equally as innovative. Drawn chiefly from a largely unseen private
collection, and curated by the ever–inventive James Crump, the
Cincinnati Art Museum’s Decade by Decade (on display through September 5), is the first exhibition spanning Evans’s work from every decade, including his years at Fortune
magazine in the 1940’s, 50s, and 60s, until his death in 1975. The
exhibition also debuts rare photographs from the Victorian House survey
series, which Evans began in 1931, as well as prints from a trip to
Tahiti the following year. As a coda, the show offers Evans’s very last
images, shot in the 70s with the then–new Polaroid SX–70. Quote Evans,
“The matter of art in photography may come down to this: it is the
capture and projection of the delights of seeing; it is the defining of
observation full and felt.”
Below: A display of both iconic and lesser–known gems from Walker Evans.
Just saw a Vanity Fair article about a famous jazz photographer, who diceased ---- already in January 2010!!!.
Herman Leonard’s Eye for Jazz
Legendary jazz photographer Herman
Leonard, now 86, shot virtually every giant of the genre—from Louis
Armstrong and Art Blakey to Miles Davis and Lena Horne—in his trademark
high-res, lush-light style. A vibrant new exhibition at New York’s Jazz
at Lincoln Center (on display through February 14) showcases Leonard’s
incomparable lens, as evidenced in this accompanying review by V.F.’s editor of creative development and this up-tempo slide show.
That Leonard look: young Dexter Gordon in New York City, 1948 (left), and the Duke in Paris, 1958.
The pictures, at first, seem jarring. Each is eerily nocturnal,
as jazz photos tend to be. Each is flooded with the brilliance—even
shock—of harsh flash. Each offers a splash of vivid detail (thanks to
the high resolution of the large Speed Graphic camera), as if the film’s
very emulsion has been awakened by a trumpet blast. And many of the
images have been taken at odd angles, conveying the sense that the scene
has somehow been rudely wrenched from midnight’s clutches.
Take the 1948 shot of Billy Eckstine.
The body of the bandleader-vocalist appears to loom across the frame at
45 degrees, leaning like a deckhand might lean into a gale. And yet the
filigree in the photo has a delicacy: the dappled ceiling above the
bandstand suggests a tropical setting; beads of sweat evoke an inner
fire; Eckstine’s long-nailed fingers, as if in prayer, are soft petals
enveloping the microphone.
Here, in a single frame, is the magic of Billy Eckstine. And here, too, is the magic of the man behind the camera.
You
can count the truly great jazz photographers on your fingers and
toes—and still leave a digit or two for tapping. I’m talking about the
legendary Bill Gottlieb and Bill Claxton and Francis Wolff, certainly,
along with peers also accomplished in other photographic genres, such as
Anthony Barboza, Roy DeCarava, Lee Friedlander, Art Kane, Gjon Mili,
Julio Mitchel, Sam Shaw, Phil Stern, and W. Eugene Smith. I’m inclined
to add to their ranks the longtime dean of jazz bassists, Milt Hinton,
whose nimble forefinger knew its way around a shutter release. And
surely I’m omitting a handful whose names escape me at the moment.
But
there’s one jazz lensman who is having a real resurgence these days,
just as the medium he covers appears to be enjoying its own renaissance.
I’m speaking, of course, of Herman Leonard.
Leonard, 86 and
still cooking, has become a 21st-century darling of gallery collectors.
His iconic shot of Dexter Gordon graces the cover of the hot new jazz
history by Gary Giddins and Scott DeVeaux—called, simply, Jazz. And, most impressive of all, Leonard has a new exhibition at New York’s Jazz at Lincoln Center, “In the Best Possible Light,” on display through Valentine’s Day.
In
the 40s, Allentown, Pennsylvania, native Herman Leonard, the son of
Romanian immigrants, was taken under the wing of Karsh of Ottawa, the
famed portraitist who excelled at using columns of light to mold
photographic icons of statesmen, celebrities, and literary figures. By
1948—around the time of bebop’s birth—Leonard had established his own
studio in Manhattan’s West Village and was making nighttime forays to
the fabled jazz clubs along 52nd Street. He would use floodlights and
his trusty Speed Graphic to lushly render musicians as luminous figures
against their dimly lit surroundings, just as the Hollywood studio
photographers of the 30s had rendered film stars amid the dark folds of
the Depression. Leonard’s studies of jazz greats, from Miles Davis to
Dexter Gordon, are among the finest ever committed to film.
Over
the last half-century, Leonard has divided his time between Europe, the
Gulf Coast, and Los Angeles, eventually losing some 6,000 photographic
prints when Hurricane Katrina swept through his New Orleans home. (All
of his negatives were miraculously spared. Two haunting water-damaged
prints—one of Frank Sinatra and one of Miles Davis—command their own
wall at the Jazz at Lincoln Center exhibition.)
For the bulk of
the J.A.L.C. show, we linger in New York, Paris, and Montreux (from 1948
through 1991). The exhibition is simply the best yet to have been
displayed in the music venue that regulars refer to as “the House of
Swing.” Though the pictures are hung in a modest hall outside the Rose
Theater (recent exhibitions have featured quirky collages by Louis
Armstrong and vintage jazz performance shots by Ryszard Horowitz),
Leonard’s collection enlivens the space as none before it. Images of six
percussionists are wisely grouped together like a veritable drum
circle. (One standout: a 1958 depiction of Art Blakey, in mid-report, at
the Club Germain, in Paris.) Jazz singers appear in trios: Eckstine
plus Sinatra plus Tony Bennett; Dinah Washington plus Lena Horne plus
Pearl Bailey. The joint curation—by Robert G. O’Meally, C. Daniel
Dawson, Diedra Harris-Kelley, Emily J. Lordi, and designer Linda
Florio—turns out to have been a blessed collaboration.
Among the
other highlights of the show include a 1960 portrait of Louis
Armstrong, with his signature bruised lips and wipe-down rag, his hands
folded and his trumpet downturned. We know he is sitting off stage right
because we see the telltale shadows of the drummer’s cymbals (not
visible in the scan that is posted in the slide show).
But we also feel the heat of an unseen performance, as viewed by
Armstrong, glaringly lit and set apart like a lonely, imperious
sovereign.
The jewel of the show, however, is Leonard’s classic
study of a young Dexter Gordon (with drummer Kenny Clarke) at New York
City’s Royal Roost in 1948. Gordon’s head is raised to the light, as if
he were inspired from on high (or, more likely, as if asked by Leonard,
“Hey, Dexter, can you just raise your chin an inch?”). His crossed hands
and the gaping mouth of his sax draw the eye subconsciously to the
photo’s fulcrum. The picture incorporates three Leonard trademarks:
bracing sidelight; the low-angle perspective that imparts grandeur upon
his subject; and the use of billows of cigarette smoke to mimic the
improvised curls that often waft from a jazzman’s horn. This particular
image also adds some tantalizing visual grace notes—a mysterious,
upturned trumpet, at left, balances the microphone (or music stand or
cymbal base) to the far right, helping to frame the photo; a relaxed
Clarke offsets Gordon’s reverential pose; and sheet music appears in the
bottom-right-hand corner, its notations soft but resonant, like a
just-completed solo that has been muffled by applause and consigned to
memory....
