Herman Leonard Photography Vol.1 - JAZZ (62 photos)

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Herman Leonard is one of the most renowned jazz photographers documenting the turbulent history of jazz in the 1940s and 1950s. Many of Leonard's works have become a kind of “icons” of jazz mythology, ideal visual images by which we imagine the golden age of jazz.

Born in 1923 in Allentown (Pennsylvania), at the age of nine he accidentally saw his older brother developing photographs in a photographic “dark room,” and the miracle of the appearance of a frozen image of time on photographic paper forever fascinated him. He received a higher education in photography at the only US university at that time offering such a specialization (Ohio University), and his studies were interrupted for two years - in 1943-1945, Herman served as an anesthesiologist in a field hospital on the American-Japanese front in Burma. Having completed his education in 1947, Leonard worked as a photographer in New York from 1948. He easily negotiated with the owners of jazz clubs to allow him to film musicians' rehearsals, in return supplying the clubs with free photographs for posters. “I wanted to create a visual diary of what I heard in the clubs,” Leonard later wrote. “I wanted people to see exactly how music is made.” And this, of course, was a success: hundreds of his photographs, now stored in the Smithsonian Institution Museum of American History in Washington, have become the golden fund of jazz photography.

He worked actively until the last months of his life, participated in the preparation of the first study of his creative heritage - the book "The Jazz Image: Seeing Music through Herman Leonard's Photography" published in 2010 by the University of Mississippi, and prepared for publication the materials of his fourth photo album, "Jazz", which is due out this November and will contain a number of previously unpublished photographs discovered by Herman while digitizing a collection of negatives.