Herman Leonard
Thursday August 26th, 2010
Earlier this month, the photography world lost Herman Leonard, famous for his dark, smoky images of jazz musicians. “When people think of jazz,” Quincy Jones once said, “their mental picture is likely one of Herman’s.”
Leonard first started taking pictures of the major figures of jazz—including Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis and Dexter Gordon, just to name a few—in 1948, when he set up his studio in Greenwich Village, New York. Like these now canonical musicians, Leonard did not achieve fame until much later—beginning in 1985, when he released his first book, The Eye of Jazz, and then in 1988, when he had his first exhibition at the Special Photographers Company in Notting Hill.
Leonard kept shooting until the end; the obituary in the Financial Times reports:
When clients inevitably asked him to recreate the mood of his most famous shots, his standard reply was: “Nobody smokes any more.”
NPR’s The Picture Show blog has, in a recent announcement of Leonard’s death, linked to a slideshow from 2009 with fascinating audio of Leonard reminiscing about his pictures. You can also take a look at a more detailed press release on Leonard’s website.
-Asad Haider
