Jazz has always had its poets, its historians, its technicians. Now it has a photographer too: an objective witness who translates into images what the clear, strict eye of the camera frames: his name is Herman Leonard.
There could be no better symbol of the fleeting precariousness of jazz than the cigarette smoke in one of his photographs. Spiralling, floating suspended and snaking around the figures to create shadows of oriental delicacy, smoke is the perfect support for the beauty and sometimes the tragic faces at the centre of his night scenes.
Jazz has always had its poets, its historians, its technicians. Now it has a photographer too: an objective witness who translates into images what the clear, strict eye of the camera frames: his name is Herman Leonard.
There could be no better symbol of the fleeting precariousness of jazz than the cigarette smoke in one of his photographs. Spiralling, floating suspended and snaking around the figures to create shadows of oriental delicacy, smoke is the perfect support for the beauty and sometimes the tragic faces at the centre of his night scenes.