Jazz Greats: Classic Photographs from the Bank of America Collection highlights photographs of jazz musicians captured by photographers as dynamic as their subjects. These photographs portray jazz music as honest, sensual, and improvisational genre historically at the forefront of African American music.
About the Artist
Antony Armstrong Jones was one of Great Britain’s most celebrated photographers best known for his elegant magazine portraits of notable personalities. Self-proclaimed “amateur photographer,” jazz bassist Milt Hinton captured intimate portraits of his mentors, colleagues and friends, that include jazz greats Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald. Gjon Mili documented jam sessions he hosted in his New York studio in the 1940s. William Gottlieb, a photographer and newspaper columnist, created some of the most-recognized images of the golden age of jazz in the 1930s and 1940s. Chuck Stewart photographed hundreds of musicians. His soft-focus portraits of iconic saxophone players Eric Dolphy, and John Coltrane with his wife, Alice, capture sensitive and sobering moments. Barbara Morgan is known for her iconic images of modern dance pioneers Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham.
Exhibition Organized By:
The magic that happens when a photographer captures a precise moment in a performing artist’s life – on or off stage – or reflects the joy the audience experiences – is on view in Jazz Greats: Classic Photographs from the Bank of America Collection.
This exhibition comprises 33 photographs by 15 photographers that date from the 1920s to the 1980s and portrays artists from varied genres in music and dance. Many are legends from the uniquely American art forms of jazz and modern dance; some are simply members of local communities entertaining their neighbors.
