SMC exhibit tracks a thrilling career
By CHRISTINA YOON Special to the Daily Press
SMC Billie Holiday frowns in concentration before taking the stage. Duke Ellington lounges in his chair as he tinkers with a new idea on the piano.A young Miles Davis lovingly holds his trumpet backstage.
For just a few weeks, Santa Monica College’s photography gallery will hold all of the dim lights, wafting smoke and easy glamour of a New York jazz club in the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s.
Photographer Herman Leonard, best known for his work with jazz icons during those years, will display his rich black and white prints in his upcoming exhibit “Jazz Giants: Photography of Herman Leonard,” which opens today and runs until Oct. 18 at SMC’s Drescher Hall.
“The thing I love about his images is that when I look at them, I’m still holding my breath for the moment to finish,” said Ford Lowcock, a photography professor at SMC who helped organize the exhibit. “They still have that life and the expectations of that scene. Not a lot of photographers can capture that.”
Leonard, now 85, shot some of his most famous photographs of legends in his early 20s. He fell in love with jazz as a soldier in World War II, when he would listen to Army-produced jazz records sent to the troops.
After his time in the Army, Leonard moved to New York City to hear them in person.
“I used photography as a way to get into the clubs for free,” Leonard said. He offered free prints to the clubs and musicians in exchange for access.
“In retrospect I got access really easily, but when I was doing it I was really nervous,” he said.“I had never been in the presence of such famous musicians. In those days they didn’t have 1,000 paparazzi all around them. It was just me.”
Leonard recalled a time when, after a show in Paris, Duke Ellington invited him back to his hotel to watch as he worked on new ideas with his arranger.
“I was thinking, here I am in the presence of two geniuses in a creative mood,” he said. “Who else would have access to that?”
Some of Leonard’s most intimate shots also came from the musicians’ recording sessions.
Leonard’s lush, elegant style of photographs became great works of art in themselves. In the foreword to Leonard’s third book, producer Quincy Jones wrote, “When people think of jazz, their mental picture is likely one of Herman Leonard.”
Lowcock agreed that Leonard’s photographs came to crystallize the unique mood of the jazz revolution during those years.
“I didn’t know much about him, but I realized I had seen a great deal of his work without realizing who had taken them,” he said.
Leonard said that this was one of the goals of his photography.
“Apart from just recording these great musicians, I was interested in making a dramatic image that I could be proud of, that I could enjoy.”
Creating that dramatic image sometimes required Leonard to haul along his own strobe lights to create effective lighting in the dim clubs. The musicians were sometimes surprised to see what came of Leonard’s shoots.
“These sessions became great works of art.” — Leonard said
“What you’re witnessing is a piece of work,”
“Their reactions all depended on their ego status — what they thought of themselves,” Leonard said. “Sometimes the treatment I gave them was not the way they saw themselves, and they didn’t like it. But that was very rare. Most of the time they were utterly delighted.”
It was a challenge for Leonard to be able to provide the resulting prints for free to the jazz players and clubs.
“Well, I used to rob banks,” he jokes. Actually, he had side work, freelancing for Life, Esquire and Look magazines and taking portraits for aspiring actors and actresses.
It was during one of these portrait sessions that he heard that Marlon Brando was looking for a photographer to travel with him on a research trip throughout southeast Asia.
“Every photographer in the country wanted to be on the assignment because Brando was at the height of his fame,” Leonard said.
Within five minutes of their meeting, Brando informed Leonard that they would be leaving within a few days, and Leonard spent several weeks snapping shots of Brando as he explored remote villages and met with political and religious leaders.
“It was a life-changing experience,” Leonard said. “I’ve had a few of those. That was one of them.”
Tragically, most of the negatives of his trip with Brando were lost due to a mix-up with the studios that owned them back in Hollywood, and Leonard is still trying to recover them.
Aside from his brushes with legends of music and film, Leonard also worked as a fashion photographer in Paris.
“It paid a lot better than what I was doing before,” he said, “but it’s different. You’re subject to the whims, opinions and idiosyncrasies of the editor of the magazine.”
Leonard formed a working relationship with Hugh Hefner in the 1950s and was named the European correspondent for Playboy magazine. Leonard shot playmates during the 1950s and early ‘60s, and the iron curtain made it difficult to recruit Eastern European girls to pose nude for a magazine that was banned in their countries.
“The K.G.B. didn’t like it,”he said.“We had to go in as tourists. Playboy was illegal in Russia, so I had three copies hidden in the lining of my suitcase.”
Leonard has selected pieces from his travels and his fashion work to be in the “Jazz Giants” exhibit alongside his more famous jazz photos. “‘Giants’ is more comprehensive than some of my other shows, which were just the jazz pieces,” he sad. “A lot of people haven’t seen this stuff.”
Among his favorites of the exhibit are prints of Miles Davis, who he describes as his most beautiful subject, and a portrait of Marilyn Monroe perched on an elephant.
“We asked him to simply curate the show with what he would like to be included, and that’s what he did,” said Lowcock. “Our hope is to introduce our students to a wonderful photographer who’s also so personable.”
It is with some luck that his prints have survived as well as they did. Until Hurricane Katrina hit, Leonard was living and working out of New Orleans, a city he discovered on an exhibit tour and fell in love with instantly. His studio and many of his prints were destroyed in the flood, and he and his daughter, Shana, and her family moved to California.
“I had a lot of friends here,” said Leonard, who now lives in Studio City. “When I got here, I had a pair of jeans and some sneakers. Within a month we had to have a yard sale because people had given us so much stuff.”
The Grammy Foundation recently awarded a grant to the Herman Leonard Jazz Archive, which was established in 2007. Leonard now spends much of his time digitally archiving the many memories he has made in his decades-long career. He no longer shoots every day, although he’s hard at work on a book set to be released next year.
“I’m 85 and I get tired,” he said with a laugh.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on September 9, 2008. Read the original PDF.