Venues
Events
MediaSpoken Word
Herman Leonard’s World of Jazz
A book that celebrates the jazz photographer Herman Leonard.
What images do you envision when you think of jazz? For many of us, we think of the old black and white, smoke-filled bar rooms and rehearsal halls that the jazz greats frequented. There has not been anyone more responsible for those beautiful images than jazz photographer Herman Leonard.
Herman Leonard died this past August at the age of 87, and, just in time for the gift-giving season is a new book that celebrates the images he created of the jazz greats and the world they lived in.
Photography and jazz music was Herman Leonard’s two great passions for over his fifty year career. Leonard’s photographs captured magical moments when the great jazz musicians were utterly transported by their music or relaxing backstage and joking among friends. Leonard’s photographs sparkle with intense light and dark values that spotlight the musicians and their instruments against masses of shadow. Leonard invoked smoky, late night atmospheres by backlighting his subjects, or silhouetting them against ethereal curls of cigarette smoke. Above all, Leonard’s piano, trumpet, bass, trombone, and drum playing musicians and singers all seem to be having the time of their lives.
Herman Leonard was born in 1923 in Allentown, Pennsylvania. He was introduced to photography by his brother, also a talented photographer.
In 1947 Leonard traveled to Ottawa to meet a photographer whose work he admired, the famous portraitist, Yousuf Karsh. As an apprentice with Karsh, Leonard was with Karsh when he made his famous portraits of Albert Einstein, President Harry S. Truman, and Martha Graham.
By the late 40′s, Leonard opened a studio in Greenwich Village where he did commercial work for Life, Look, Esquire, Playboy, and Cosmopolitan, and made portraits of movie and theater stars. At night he roamed the jazz nightclubs on 52nd Street, Broadway, and in Harlem, often trading the admission fee for free photographs of the musicians the club owners could use for publicity. He befriended and photographed the greatest jazz musicians of that era: Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Count Basie, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Sarah Vaughn, and many others.
His images are found here.