HERMAN LEONARD
Herman Leonard (1923–2010, born Allentown, Pennsylvania) was an American photographer whose intimate and technically masterful images of jazz musicians in performance and at rest constitute the most significant body of jazz photography of the twentieth century. Upon graduating in 1947, he drove to Ottawa on the chance of working with Yousuf Karsh, the master portraitist, who took him on as an apprentice and instilled in him the discipline and reverence for the subject that would define his mature practice.
Moving to New York in the late 1940s, Leonard gained access to the clubs of 52nd Street and Harlem at the precise moment of bebop’s flowering, photographing Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, and Ella Fitzgerald, among many others, with a candour and emotional intelligence that set his work apart from any other photographer working in the field. His photographs, characterised by dramatic backlighting and the atmospheric haze of cigarette smoke, have become the definitive visual record of the golden age of jazz. He was featured in the Family of Man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1955.
Leonard received the Milt Hinton Award for Excellence in Jazz Photography in 1999, the Excellence in Photography Award from the Jazz Journalists Association in 2000, the Downbeat Magazine Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004, and the Lucie Award for Achievement in Portraiture in 2008.