Meeting the Masters at the
6th Annual Lucie Awards, part II Continuing our “meeting with the masters,” in this article we look at Herman Leonard, (achievement in portraiture) – his personal path, artistic influences, and some images that exemplify his creative vision. Accepting his Lucie statuette at Avery Fisher Hall, Leonard summed up the trajectory of his life this way: “After sixty years of travel around the world it’s an honor to return to this city where I started my career to receive this award. I love all of you very much. Thank you.” New York City was not only where Leonard started–it was also where he did his best photography, from 1948 to 1956, moving among the smoke-filled jazz clubs of Broadway, 52nd Street, and Harlem. Born in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Leonard had become enthralled with photography as a child of nine, gotten a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in photography from Ohio University in 1947 (interrupted by a two-year stint in the U.S. Army), and talked his way into an apprenticeship with portraitist Yousuf Karsh, who lived in Ottawa. Karsh photographed a wide range of luminaries, from Clark Gable and Martha Graham to Alfred Einstein and President Harry S. Truman. Fortified with his experience, Leonard moved to Greenwich Village in 1948 and set up a studio at 220 Sullivan Street. But his personal passion blazed in a realm “where no commercial gain was attached” —photographing the jazz giants he idolized. Realizing his camera was his “free ticket,” Leonard offered prints in exchange for admittance to the clubs, which soon meant privileged entrée into rehearsals. There he could move freely, and that he did, photographing Miles Davis, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and more. Many became close friends, Dizzy his best. In 1950 he photographed a young Tony Bennett at an audition. When Bennett took the stage at the 2008 Lucie Awards to introduce his friend, the audience was doubly wowed. “He makes it look so effortless, his timing’s impeccable,” he said, adding, “In the family of artists, this man is the purest.” Technically, Leonard worked simply, setting up just two lights and letting the muse and the music lead him. “I was shooting for myself, and that gave me freedom. I could experiment. I did it my way. Those are the best pictures I’ve shot.” In one mesmerizing image after another, Leonard called upon some of the skills he had honed with Karsh, but moved into his own territory, developing his own style–part poetry, part revelation. Leonard’s characteristic gorgeous prints (which he still, at age 83, makes himself, immersing his hands in the chemicals) breathe life into the subject. Their rich velvet blacks, shadings of light and shadow, rivulets of smoke, and vertiginous angles are soul-stirring. Quincy Jones wrote of Leonard’s photography, “When people think of jazz, their mental picture is likely one of Herman’s.” The irony about this work is that it lay dormant for so many years, though Leonard kept his negatives with him in his moves: first, to Paris in the 1950s, where he worked in fashion and advertising and as European photographer for Playboy Magazine. What he earned (as much as $1000 a day plus expenses) allowed him to save enough money to keep following his heart, in 1980 to a 300-year-old farmhouse on Ibiza, a tiny island in the Mediterranean off the east coast of Spain. Paying just forty dollars a month rent, there he would live subsistence-style, apart from the commercial world of photography, for the next eight years. “That was probably one of the most glorious times of my life,” he says. “I had two children then and we lived off the land, growing vegetables, surrounded by wheat fields and almond trees. We had no running water, no telephone, no tv; solar panels on the roof. We were five miles from a paved road.” He was never bored, nor lacked friends, for Ibiza was home to other expatriates like him, living an idyllic life apart. It was only after a 1988 show in London of the jazz work that it began to be widely seen. His first U.S. show premiered in 1989 and toured nationally. In 1991 Leonard moved to New Orleans, where he photographed the jazz scene and continued to exhibit his work around the world in solo shows. Leonard’s jazz photographs are now collector’s items, and three books of his works have been published. Jazz, Giants, and Journeys: The Photography of Herman Leonard (Scala Publishers, 2006) is his third book. The permanent archives of American Musical History in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C. holds a collection of Leonard’s unique record of the jazz scene from the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which destroyed Leonard’s home, studio, and some 8,000 photographs that he had hand-printed, he relocated to Studio City, California and reestablished his life and business. When I asked Leonard what was next for him, he said, “I don’t want to go back. I want to go forward.” Oh yes, a publisher in London wants to do another book. But then again, as Leonard said just as we were concluding, “It might be time to drop out of the world again.” Coming next: ©2008, Mary Ann Lynch.
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© Red Dog Journal, 2008 |