Herman Leonard

Herman Leonard (born March 6, 1923 in Allentown , Pennsylvania , † August 14, 2010 in Los Angeles , California ) was an American photographer known as "The Eye of Jazz" for his outstanding portraits of prominent jazz musicians .

Life

At the age of nine, Herman Leonard witnessed a photo being printed and, according to his own statement, fell under the spell of this cultural technique. Leonard went to the only university that offered a degree and academic degree in photography at the time. He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in photography from Ohio University in 1947 . His college career was interrupted by a conscription to the US Army during World War II . In the military he served in the “13. Mountain Medical Battalion ”as a medical technician and anesthetist in Burma and cooperated closely with the national Chinese troops of Chiang Kai-shek who fought against the Japanese invading forces .

His parents Joseph Leonard and Rose Morrison were Romanian immigrants who had emigrated to the United States from the third largest Romanian city of Iași . After graduating from college, Leonard apprenticed to portrait photographer Yousuf Karsh for a year . Karsh provided him with valuable practical experience and technical finesse, while celebrities such as Albert Einstein , Harry S. Truman and Martha Graham were immortalized by him.

Leonard opened his first own photo studio in 1948 at 220 Sullivan Street in New York 's Greenwich Village . He worked as a freelancer for various magazines. He often spent the evenings in the event venues Royal Roost and later in Birdland , where he photographed jazz musicians such as Dexter Gordon , Charlie Parker , Dizzy Gillespie , Billie Holiday , Duke Ellington , Miles Davis and others. The number of possible recordings was technically limited at that time. Back then, glass plate negatives were still used. Leonard increased the sensitivity of the plates by steaming them with mercury.

He told the interviewer Marc Myers how he got the necessary flash shots without disturbing and annoying the musicians on stage. He placed a flash right next to the organizer's spotlight and a second behind the performers, and he only triggered them sparingly and when it was absolutely necessary during the concert. He made the lion's share of his live recordings during the warm season and rehearsals of the musicians.

After commissioned work for the jazz publisher Norman Granz , who used his photos for the album covers, Leonard was hired by Marlon Brando as his personal travel photographer in 1956 to document an extensive research stay in East Asia. After his return he moved to Paris , worked as a commissioned photographer for the fashion and advertising industries and as the European correspondent for Playboy . Leonard's last series of jazz portraits date from this period.

In 1980 Leonard moved with his wife Elisabeth and two children, Shana and David, from Paris to the island of Ibiza , where he lived until 1988 when he finally moved to London. Leonard had his first major retrospective art exhibition in the British capital . Organized by the Special Photographers Company in Notting Hill , this exhibition attracted more than ten thousand paying visitors. The retrospective toured the USA in 1989 and Leonard moved to San Francisco at short notice. After an exhibition in the "Gallery for Fine Photography" in New Orleans , he fell in love with this city and made it his adopted home for the next 14 years, immersing himself in the lively jazz and blues scene of the coastal city.

The Hurricane Katrina destroyed 2,005 Leonards apartment and studio. The photographer and his family lost many possessions, including thousands of prints, but his negatives were well protected in the safes of New Orleans' Ogden Museum of Southern Art . After surviving Hurricane Katrina, Leonard moved to Studio City near Los Angeles in California and rebuilt his business there, taking on orders from music and film companies and magazines.

In 2006, the then 82-year-old photographer was the protagonist of the documentary Saving Jazz , co-produced by the BBC and the Sundance Festival , which was about his loss and the rebuilding of his life's work. Two years later, Leonard was the first photographer ever to receive a Grammy “Foundation Grant for Preservation and Archiving”, which financially enabled him to digitize and catalog his nearly 60,000 jazz negatives.

Leonard's jazz photographs, which have since become art collectibles, form an important documentation of the jazz scene of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. His collection of works is now in the American Musical History archives in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, DC In 2008, longtime personal friend Tony Bennett presented Leonard with the Lucie Award Achievement in Portraiture at a ceremony at New Lincoln Center York city. In June 2009, Leonard was a lecturer in the photography graduate class at Ohio University, where he also received an honorary doctorate . Most recently it became known that he was working on a collaborative project with musician and producer Lenny Kravitz in January 2010 .

The 87-year-old died in 2010 at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. Numerous obituaries around the world underlined his artistic reputation and the recognition of the entire western cultural world for this pioneer of jazz photography.

Awards

• 2009 Honorary Doctorate in Photography from Ohio University
• 2009 Bruce Lundvall Award , named “Official Photographer” of the Montreal Jazz Festival
• 2008 Lucie Award from the "Achievement in Portraiture" category of the Lucie Foundation, New York City
• 2004 "Lifetime Achievement Award" from Down Beat magazine
• 2000 Excellence in Photography Award from the American Jazz Journalists Association
• 1999 Milt Hinton Award for Excellence in Jazz Photography from the American Jazz Photographer's Association
• 1995 Honorary Master of Science in Photography from The Brooks Institute of Photography
• 1985 Prix ​​du livre de jazz

reception

Two documentaries in the 1990s underlined the appreciation of his life's work as a historical jazz visual designer. Philippe Koechlin created a documentary film Lady Day about Billie Holliday for “Program 33” and Canal Plus in 1995 , which was based on Leonard's historical recordings. Two years later, the Louisiana Public Broadcasting Company released a documentary Frame After Frame , in which Tony Bennett presented Herman Leonard's creative history.

The volume The Jazz Image: Seeing Music through Herman Leonard's Photography , which was published by the University Press of Mississippi in 2010, is the first scientific work on Leonard's life's work. The publication of the volume Jazz by the publishers Grove Atlantic (UK) and Bloomsbury (USA) has been announced in November 2010, which will make Leonard's photographic work, including numerous previously unpublished images, generally accessible.

Leonard's work is in prestigious public collections, including the Jazz at Lincoln Center, New York City, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, and the George Eastman House, New York City.

“Herman is my favorite artist of any technique, he's a painter with his camera, and he makes it look so effortless. His timing is as great as any Charlie Parker solo or Lester Young or Count Basie beat. Herman's work will live on and in 50 years from now, when the revolution is realized, jazz will be recognized for the truly great American art form it is. "

- Tony Bennett

Photo book works (selection)

• Jazz memories . Editions Filipacchi, Levallois-Perret 1995, ISBN 2-85018-247-8 (English / French)
• The Eye of Jazz . Viking, London 1989, ISBN 0-670-82771-1 .

literature

• The Jazz Image: Seeing Music through Herman Leonard's Photography . University Press of Mississippi, 2010
• David Houston: Jazz, Giants and Journeys. The photography of Herman Leonard . Scala Publishers, 2006

Web links

• Literature by and about Herman Leonard in the catalog of the German National Library
• Herman Leonard's website
• Richly illustrated obituary for Herman Leonard (1923-2010) , accessed August 17, 2010
• JazzWax interview with Leonard from October 2009
• Video about Herman Leonard in his famous Charlie Parker photo

Individual evidence

1. ^ A Gallery for Fine Photography . ( Memento of the original from August 14, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Herman Leonard Biography; Retrieved August 16, 2010 
2. ↑ imaginginsider.com ( Memento of the original from August 27, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
3. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g} Geraldine Baum: Official press text ( Memento of the original from August 19, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on Leonard's website 
4. ^ David Houston: Jazz, Giants and Journeys: The Photography of Herman Leonard . 2006, p. 234
5. ^ Herman Leonard's Eye for Jazz .
6. ^ Marc Myers: Herman Leonard (1923-2010) . ( Memento of the original from August 30, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. JazzWax, August 16, 2010 
7. ^ Thousands of famed photos ruined .  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Chicago Tribune , September 2, 2005  
8. ↑ lucieawards.com ( Memento of the original from July 17, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
9. ↑ hermanleonard.com ( Memento of the original from August 19, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
10. ↑ jazztimes.com
11. ↑ allaboutjazz.com ( Memento of the original from August 18, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
12. ↑ Keith Thursby: Obituary: Herman Leonard dies at 87; photographer chronicled mid-century jazz scene . In: Los Angeles Times , August 16, 2010
13. ↑ Video of the Bruce Lundvall Award 2009 ( Memento of the original from December 22, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
14. ↑ lucieawards.com ( Memento of the original from December 21, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.