Herman Leonard's smoky, moody images of jazz greats such as Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong capture a lost era, says Mick Brown.
Describing the animating force behind his photographs of jazz musicians, Herman Leonard once spoke of wanting to “make people see the way the music sounded”. And it is true that for many people Leonard’s pictures, in all their smoky, moody brilliance, are the defining pictorial representation of jazz.
Goethe described architecture as “frozen music”, but the description might equally apply to Leonard’s photographs; his highly stylised images of artists such as Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Dexter Gordon and Lester Young performing in the jazz clubs of New York in the late Forties and early Fifties beseech, caress, seduce and inspire.
These photographs are, among other things, a vivid testament to the seductive powers of spiffy headgear, immaculate tailoring and classic vintage eyewear.
This new anthology spans six decades of Leonard’s work, from 1948 when he first started taking photographs in the clubs around 52nd Street in New York, and includes many hitherto unseen photographs, as well as his most familiar and celebrated images.
It was originally conceived as the definitive celebration of his life’s work, but instead became his epitaph when Leonard died in August at the age of 87. As a record of the golden years of jazz, it is unsurpassable.
The son of Jewish immigrants from Romania, Leonard began his career as an apprentice to the great portrait photographer Yousuf Karsh, before moving to New York in 1948, where he set up in a small studio in Greenwich Village and began photographing jazz musicians.
It was a labour of love. As Leonard would later recall, there was little profit in shooting pictures of jazz musicians at the time, and he couldn’t even afford entry to the clubs; the owners would let him come in and work in return for a few shots for publicity purposes.
From Karsh, he learnt how to control light and texture. Leonard shot only in black and white – the viewer’s brain, he explained, “doesn’t have to work as much” – his subjects often backlit with strobe lights, dividing the pictures into planes of light and deep shadow.
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