[Dixielandjazz] William P. Gottlieb exhibit reviewed

[Robert Ringwald]

As Artfully Rendered as the Music Itself
by Mark Feeney
Boston Globe, May 3, 2011
Photography, more than any other art, blurs the line between form and content. A
formally superb photograph of a banal or even ugly subject -- Edward Weston's produce,
William Eggleston's tricycle, Irving Penn's cigarette butts -- can most certainly
be a great photograph. Yet just as certainly a formally undistinguished photograph
of a compelling subject can be compelling.
Put another way, it's hard to imagine a picture of Miles Davis that wouldn't be worth
looking at -- even a picture where he was so ill-advised as to have a pencil-thin
mustache and seriously conked hair. Which he does in a photograph William P. Gottlieb
took of him and Coleman Hawkins around 1948. It's one of 65 images in "Portraits
from the Golden Age of Jazz: Photographs by William P. Gottlieb," which runs at Endicott
College's Center for the Arts through May 29.
Not that Gottlieb was undistinguished. He has an honored place in the jazz photography
pantheon, along with Herman Leonard and William Claxton and Chuck Stewart. Milt Hinton
and Francis Wolff are there, too, though in a separate category, as jazz double-dippers:
Hinton, as an even better bassist than he was a photographer (which is saying a lot);
Wolff, as a cofounder of Blue Note Records (Blue Note being to jazz what ambrosia
is to beverages).
The point is that there were few people in the 20th century as photogenic as Duke
Ellington or Dizzy Gillespie or Billie Holiday. "Portraits from the Golden Age" includes
photographs of each. Gottlieb shows Lady Day in performance, eyes shut, mouth open.
That open mouth is a rictus of... pain? triumph? ecstasy? pride? All that and more,
of course.
Gottlieb took these photos in the 1940s. Jazz photographers back then had a lot to
put up with: crummy lighting, often-wary subjects, a lack of respect from photo editors
and the culture at large. But they also had pure photographic gold on the other side
of their viewfinders, something they had the ears, as well as eyes, to recognize.
Gottlieb's story illustrates how dismissively jazz was once treated by the cultural
establishment. His first job out of college was in the advertising department of
the Washington Post. He proposed writing a jazz column on the side. The Post said
fine. After a few columns it stopped sending a photographer to shoot Gottlieb's subjects
-- too expensive. So he bought a Speed Graphic and taught himself how to use it.
This came in handy during World War II, when Gottlieb served as a photography officer
with the Army Air Force. It came in even handier when a postwar job with DownBeat,
the jazz bible, gave Gottlieb access to pretty much anyone and everyone who mattered
on the bandstand.
The years immediately after World War II saw enormous ferment in jazz. The bebop
revolution, spearheaded by Charlie Parker and Gillespie, was transforming the music.
A sense of that revolutionary excitement comes through in these pictures. Less happily,
so does a sense of experimentation. In one picture, Gottlieb frames the disembodied
head of Mel Torme with plumes of mist. Torme's nickname was the Velvet Fog, after
all. The photographer got the effect by filling the singer's dressing-room sink with
dry ice. (A better photograph would have been the look on the janitor's face when
he came in to clean up.) Gottlieb shoots bandleader Stan Kenton and trumpeter Buddy
Childers in a fractured mirror. The result looks like a still from a parody of the
"Lady from Shanghai" finale. Where's Orson Welles when you need him?
Such trickiness is unusual, though. To be sure, Gottlieb plays with expressive angles
and takes advantage of atmospheric lighting. But his basic instinct is to shoot subjects
straightforwardly and let them (rather than his camera) provide the magic.
Some of these pictures, like the one of Holiday, are famous. Other classics are Ellington
seen in a dressing-room mirror and Django Reinhardt cradling his guitar as if embracing
a lover (which, in a sense, is just what he's doing).
Many are far less familiar. The cigarette between the lips of the great swing drummer
Dave Tough could be a lit fuse. If the cigar in the mouth of the stride piano master
Willie "The Lion" Smith were any bigger it could audition to be a clarinet. Playing
solitaire, Sarah Vaughan looks very young, very skinny, and very foxy.
We variously see Gottlieb's subjects in performance, backstage, meeting fans. As
its title indicates, the 18 pictures in "Jazz from Row Six: Photographs by Jean Germain"
were all taken from the same spot, the sixth row, at the Jazz Club of Sarasota, in
Florida. The show runs at the Griffin Museum Gallery at the Cambridge Homes through
July 6.
Seated in the audience, Germain couldn't use tripod or flash. So her pictures can
feel hasty and unfinished (which is bad) and unmediated and right there (which is
good). She took the photos between 1981 and 2007. That jazz world was very different
from Gottlieb's, but there's at least one bit of direct continuity. Lionel Hampton
figures in both shows. Half a century later, Hamp was still flyin' home.


--Bob Ringwald
www.ringwald.com
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