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Sep. 12th, 2005 08:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mojosmomBillie Holiday, by Herman Leonard hangs on my living room wall.
GULF COAST CRISIS: JAZZ HERITAGE
Thousands of famed photos ruined
By Howard Reich
Tribune arts critic
September 12, 2005
They rank among the world's most iconic images of jazz:
Louis Armstrong lost in a reverie; Duke Ellington bathed in a beam of white light; Ella Fitzgerald caught up in a song, a bead of sweat rolling down her cheek.
Stored for more than a decade in photographer Herman Leonard's home-studio in New Orleans, the precious negatives barely were rescued from the path of Hurricane Katrina. But thousands of Leonard's sumptuous black-and-white prints, documenting not only a golden era of jazz but also more recent New Orleans music, have been destroyed by the flooding that followed.
Were it not for the hurried actions of Leonard's staff, which arranged for several thousand of his most precious jazz negatives to be placed on high ground--under protection of armed guards--the world would have lost the visual record of an American art form.
Those negatives are safe and dry in a vault at an undisclosed location in New Orleans. But uncounted thousands of Leonard prints, which range in price from $950 to $15,000 each, are floating in his waterlogged compound, a 3,500-square foot edifice he fled on Saturday night, Aug. 27, two days before Katrina struck.
"We're alive and safe, that's the main thing, but we're kind of lost," said Leonard, speaking from Los Angeles, where the octogenarian photographer and his family are with friends.
"I think my father is in shock," said daughter Shana Leonard, who escaped with him, her husband and daughter by car to Houston, then by plane to Los Angeles.
"It's hard for an 82-year-old man to re-create his work."
Although photographer Leonard hastens to note that his travails are "nowhere near what some people are going through," a large part of his life's work has been lost.
The prints that Leonard has spent several years making are not easily duplicated, even though the negatives survive. Leonard, who shot his most famous images in the 1940s and '50s in long-gone New York clubs such as the Royal Roost and Three Deuces, uses darkroom techniques tailored to the peculiarities of his aged, often-cracked negatives.
"I've seen him work--what he does in the darkroom is just as important as what he shoots through his lens," said Jenny Bagert, Leonard's manager.
"There are very few old-school printing masters still alive. You would be very hard-pressed to find someone who could print those negatives as well as he can.
"And I don't think Herman can live long enough to create again everything he has printed," Bagert said.
Darkroom magic
Specifically, Leonard uses a variety of printing techniques to compensate for pictures that were taken under less-than-ideal conditions. Shot a half-century ago in poorly lighted nightclubs, his images often were far from perfect exposures.
What he couldn't capture under prevailing circumstances in the clubs, however, he learned to improve while printing. The smoke that characteristically billows behind Leonard subjects such as tenor saxophone giant Dexter Gordon or archetypal jazz singer Billie Holiday, the play of light and half-light that silhouettes images of a young Dizzy Gillespie or a pensive Lena Horne, are painstakingly brought out through deft use of his enlarger and nimble application of chemicals.
"I think Herman has reached a new plateau as a printer," said Bagert, "but now there are going to be a lot fewer Herman Leonard prints out there, and that's heartbreaking."
These celebrated photos by Leonard, who studied with the famed portraitist Yousuf Karsh, depicted African-American jazz artists in a heroic light that was unusual for the era.
"Herman Leonard gives us intimate moments--a glimpse into these subjects and their worlds that other photographers do not," said David Houston, chief curator of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, in New Orleans, which in April opened an exhibition of Leonard's work and helped him store the jazz negatives.
The miracle is that so much of Leonard's work was saved.
Scrambling to save stuff
On the morning of Aug. 27, Leonard office manager Elizabeth Underwood began packing the jazz negatives into boxes while backing up scanned versions of the images onto a computer hard drive. She and Bagert hired friends to drive the material to the vault that afternoon. Then they packaged slightly less valuable Leonard work: images of celebrities, nudes, exotic travel locales and other material for a planned book and museum exhibition. This material went into a concrete storage facility in nearby Metairie and is believed to be safe.
But time was running out, and a great deal of work had to be left behind.
"You're rescuing Herman's livelihood, as well as some of the greatest photography ever made, but you've got your own house to go to, too, and you're terrified," recalled Underwood, who, with Bagert, left Leonard's place at around 7 p.m.
When Bagert returned to the site by boat two days ago, the first floor of the compound was under black water, and mold was crawling up the walls.
"I'm hoping to go back this week and see what we can still retrieve," she said, referring fans to Leonard's Web site--www.hermanleonard.com--for updates.
"But I don't think that house is going to be standing very long."
GULF COAST CRISIS: JAZZ HERITAGE
Thousands of famed photos ruined
By Howard Reich
Tribune arts critic
September 12, 2005
They rank among the world's most iconic images of jazz:
Louis Armstrong lost in a reverie; Duke Ellington bathed in a beam of white light; Ella Fitzgerald caught up in a song, a bead of sweat rolling down her cheek.
Stored for more than a decade in photographer Herman Leonard's home-studio in New Orleans, the precious negatives barely were rescued from the path of Hurricane Katrina. But thousands of Leonard's sumptuous black-and-white prints, documenting not only a golden era of jazz but also more recent New Orleans music, have been destroyed by the flooding that followed.
Were it not for the hurried actions of Leonard's staff, which arranged for several thousand of his most precious jazz negatives to be placed on high ground--under protection of armed guards--the world would have lost the visual record of an American art form.
Those negatives are safe and dry in a vault at an undisclosed location in New Orleans. But uncounted thousands of Leonard prints, which range in price from $950 to $15,000 each, are floating in his waterlogged compound, a 3,500-square foot edifice he fled on Saturday night, Aug. 27, two days before Katrina struck.
"We're alive and safe, that's the main thing, but we're kind of lost," said Leonard, speaking from Los Angeles, where the octogenarian photographer and his family are with friends.
"I think my father is in shock," said daughter Shana Leonard, who escaped with him, her husband and daughter by car to Houston, then by plane to Los Angeles.
"It's hard for an 82-year-old man to re-create his work."
Although photographer Leonard hastens to note that his travails are "nowhere near what some people are going through," a large part of his life's work has been lost.
The prints that Leonard has spent several years making are not easily duplicated, even though the negatives survive. Leonard, who shot his most famous images in the 1940s and '50s in long-gone New York clubs such as the Royal Roost and Three Deuces, uses darkroom techniques tailored to the peculiarities of his aged, often-cracked negatives.
"I've seen him work--what he does in the darkroom is just as important as what he shoots through his lens," said Jenny Bagert, Leonard's manager.
"There are very few old-school printing masters still alive. You would be very hard-pressed to find someone who could print those negatives as well as he can.
"And I don't think Herman can live long enough to create again everything he has printed," Bagert said.
Darkroom magic
Specifically, Leonard uses a variety of printing techniques to compensate for pictures that were taken under less-than-ideal conditions. Shot a half-century ago in poorly lighted nightclubs, his images often were far from perfect exposures.
What he couldn't capture under prevailing circumstances in the clubs, however, he learned to improve while printing. The smoke that characteristically billows behind Leonard subjects such as tenor saxophone giant Dexter Gordon or archetypal jazz singer Billie Holiday, the play of light and half-light that silhouettes images of a young Dizzy Gillespie or a pensive Lena Horne, are painstakingly brought out through deft use of his enlarger and nimble application of chemicals.
"I think Herman has reached a new plateau as a printer," said Bagert, "but now there are going to be a lot fewer Herman Leonard prints out there, and that's heartbreaking."
These celebrated photos by Leonard, who studied with the famed portraitist Yousuf Karsh, depicted African-American jazz artists in a heroic light that was unusual for the era.
"Herman Leonard gives us intimate moments--a glimpse into these subjects and their worlds that other photographers do not," said David Houston, chief curator of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, in New Orleans, which in April opened an exhibition of Leonard's work and helped him store the jazz negatives.
The miracle is that so much of Leonard's work was saved.
Scrambling to save stuff
On the morning of Aug. 27, Leonard office manager Elizabeth Underwood began packing the jazz negatives into boxes while backing up scanned versions of the images onto a computer hard drive. She and Bagert hired friends to drive the material to the vault that afternoon. Then they packaged slightly less valuable Leonard work: images of celebrities, nudes, exotic travel locales and other material for a planned book and museum exhibition. This material went into a concrete storage facility in nearby Metairie and is believed to be safe.
But time was running out, and a great deal of work had to be left behind.
"You're rescuing Herman's livelihood, as well as some of the greatest photography ever made, but you've got your own house to go to, too, and you're terrified," recalled Underwood, who, with Bagert, left Leonard's place at around 7 p.m.
When Bagert returned to the site by boat two days ago, the first floor of the compound was under black water, and mold was crawling up the walls.
"I'm hoping to go back this week and see what we can still retrieve," she said, referring fans to Leonard's Web site--www.hermanleonard.com--for updates.
"But I don't think that house is going to be standing very long."
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Date: 2005-09-12 06:04 pm (UTC)