Saturday, December 17, 2011

They Put the Face on an American Sound


The book Blue Notes in Black and White highlights jazz photography.

From a review in the New York Times...

Instead, this occasionally powerful but uneven book is a selective and essayistic history on how the still-image camera conferred cultural legitimacy to jazz as black music, for the most part between the late 1930s and the mid-1960s. It analyzes the early photo spreads on jazz in Life magazine, as well as the writing and the layouts; the development of bebop, with its own visual code, as rendered by the jazz press; and the diverging looks of late-1950s jazz as suggested by album covers released by independent labels in New York and Los Angeles. (Shadows and cigarette smoke versus sunlight and oceanfront.) It deals at length with Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins, and how pictures of them on and off stage helped build or maintain their personas. Slide Show: More jazz images.

The book focuses on art photographers, or photojournalists with a serious interest in photography as art, and it shows you their relationships and lines of influence.


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