Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2009/12/19
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Over 20 inches (yes, more than 50 centimeters) of snow have fallen on Charlottesville in the last 24 hours. It's been a great time to immerse myself in the Jazz Loft Project. Very exciting for anyone who likes jazz or photography or both. I've been at it for a couple hours, and I'm just getting started. The Project comes out of Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies and showcases the thousands of photos and audio recordings that W. Eugene Smith made in his New York loft in the late '50s and early '60s. It was the place to be, whether you were Thelonious Monk or Henri Cartier-Bresson, Charles Mingus or Salvador Dali. I started out listening to this WNYC podcast in which (among many, many other things) jazz bassist Steve Swallow talks about Smith as a "classic Leica" photographer -- "...he'd just kind of shoot it like a pistol." Pianist Paul Bley uses almost the same words when referring to his "six-shooter style." Photographers Robert Frank and John Cohen show up to talk about Smith, too: http://beta.wnyc.org/shows/jazz-loft/2009/nov/29/ More podcasts and a small gallery of Smith's photos are on WNYC's Project home page: http://beta.wnyc.org/shows/jazz-loft/ Here's a link to the Duke site, which has a larger photo gallery and many of audio samples from the tapes: http://www.jazzloftproject.org/ The Duke site describes the Project this way: "From 1957 to 1965 legendary photographer W. Eugene Smith made approximately 4,000 hours of recordings on 1,741 reel-to-reel tapes and nearly 40,000 photographs in a loft building in Manhattan's wholesale flower district where major jazz musicians of the day gathered and played their music. "Smith's work has remained in archives until now. "The Jazz Loft Project is dedicated to uncovering the stories behind this legendary moment in American cultural history." --John N.B. Smith did use Leicas, but also Canon and Nikon RFs, among other cameras. ****************************** John Edwin Mason, Photography: http://www.JohnEdwinMason.com Charlottesville and Cape Town