Traveling Exhibition

In January 1955 W. Eugene Smith, a celebrated photographer at Life magazine whose quarrels with his editors were legendary, quit his longtime well-paying job at the magazine. He was thirty-six. He was ambitious, quixotic, in search of greater freedom and artistic license. He turned his attention to a freelance assignment in Pittsburgh, a three-week job that turned into a four-year obsession and in the end, remained unfinished. In a letter to Ansel Adams, Smith described it as a “debacle” and an “embarrassment.”

In 1957, Smith moved out of the home he shared with his wife and four children in Croton-on-Hudson, New York and moved into a dilapidated, five-story loft building at 821 Sixth Avenue in New York City’s wholesale flower district. 821 Sixth Avenue (between Twenty-eighth and Twenty-ninth streets) was a late-night haunt of musicians, including some of the biggest names in jazz—Charles Mingus, Zoot Sims, Bill Evans, and Thelonious Monk among them—and countless fascinating, underground characters. As his ambitions broke down for the epic Pittsburgh project, Smith found solace in the chaotic, somnambulistic world of the loft and its artists. He turned his documentary impulses away from Pittsburgh and toward his offbeat new surroundings.

From 1957 to 1965, Smith exposed 1,447 rolls of film at the loft, making roughly 40,000 pictures, the largest body of work in his career.  He photographed the nocturnal jazz scene as well as life on the streets of the flower district, as seen from his fourth-floor window. He wired the building like a surreptitious recording studio and made 1,740 reels (4,000 hours) of stereo and mono audiotapes, capturing more than 300 musicians, among them Roy Haynes, Sonny Rollins, Bill Evans, Roland Kirk, Alice Coltrane, Don Cherry, and Paul Bley. He also recorded legends such as pianists Eddie Costa, and Sonny Clark, drummers Ronnie Free and Edgar Bateman, saxophonist Lin Halliday, bassist Henry Grimes, and multi-instrumentalist Eddie Listengart.

Also dropping in on the nighttime scene were the likes of Doris Duke, Norman Mailer, Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Salvador Dalí, as well as pimps, prostitutes, drug addicts, thieves, photography students, local cops, building inspectors, marijuana dealers, and others.

The Jazz Loft Project, organized by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University in cooperation with the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona and the W. Eugene Smith estate, is devoted to preserving and cataloging Smith's tapes, researching the photographs, and obtaining oral history interviews with all surviving loft participants. The transferred recordings reveal high sound quality and extraordinary musical and cultural content, offering unusual documentation of an after-hours New York jazz scene.

The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University and Duke's Center for Documentary Studies present "The Jazz Loft Project: W. Eugene Smith in New York City, 1957-1965," an exhibition of photographs and recordings of some of the jazz world's greatest legends. In the late 1950s, W. Eugene Smith lived and worked in a New York City loft building with an amazing list of visitors--jazz musicians, filmmakers, writers and artists. In photographs and audio recordings, he documented an era and rare moments with people such as Thelonious Monk, Zoot Simms, Norman Mailer and Salvador Dali, among others.

In January 1955, W. Eugene Smith, a celebrated photographer at Life magazine whose quarrels with his editors were legendary, quit his longtime well-paying job at the magazine. He was ambitious, quixotic and in search of greater freedom and artistic license. He turned his attention to a freelance assignment in Pittsburgh, a three-week job that turned into a four-year obsession and, in the end, remained unfinished. During this trying period, Smith moved into a dilapidated, five-story loft building at 821 Sixth Avenue in New York City's wholesale flower district.

The address 821 Sixth Avenue was a late-night haunt of musicians, including some of the biggest names in jazz-Charles Mingus, Zoot Sims, Bill Evans and Thelonious Monk among them-and countless fascinating, underground characters. From 1957 to 1965, Smith exposed 1,447 rolls of film at his loft, making roughly 40,000 pictures, the largest body of work in his career, photographing the nocturnal jazz scene as well as life on the streets of the flower district, as seen from his fourth-floor window. He wired the building like a surreptitious recording studio and made 1,740 reels (4,000 hours) of stereo and mono audiotapes, capturing more than 300 musicians, among them Roy Haynes, Sonny Rollins, Bill Evans, Roland Kirk, Alice Coltrane, Don Cherry and Paul Bley. He recorded, as well, legends such as pianists Eddie Costa and Sonny Clark, drummers Ronnie Free and Edgar Bateman, saxophonist Lin Halliday, bassist Henry Grimes and multi-instrumentalist Eddie Listengart. Also dropping in on the nighttime scene were the likes of Doris Duke, Norman Mailer, Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Salvidor Dali, as well as pimps, prostitutes, drug addicts, thieves, photography students, local cops, building inspectors and marijuana dealers.

Writer Sam Stephenson discovered Smith's jazz loft photographs and tapes 11 years ago, when he was researching another Smith project in the archives at the University of Arizona's Center for Creative Photography, and he has spent seven years cataloging, archiving, selecting and editing these materials for a book and, along with other partners, a radio series, an exhibition and website.

"The Jazz Loft Project: W. Eugene Smith in New York City, 1957-1965" was organized by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona and the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University.

The Jazz Loft Project at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University was made possible through the generous support of the Reva and David Logan Foundation, with significant additional support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (The Grammy Foundation), the Duke University Office of the Provost, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, Ken and Amelia Jacob, and Kimpton Hotels.

At Duke University, major support for the exhibition is given by David Lamond, Anne T. and Robert M. Bass, the Robert K. Steel Family Foundation, Sally and Russell Robinson, Bruce and Martha Karsh, Charles Weinraub and Emily Kass, Drs. Victor and Lenore Behar, Barbara T. and Jack O. Bovender Jr., G. Richard Wagoner, the Bostock Family Foundation, Laurene M. and Scott M. Sperling, and Ruth W. and A. Morris Williams Jr. Additional support is given by William H. and Lorna Chafe, John A. Forlines Jr., Tom and Margaret Gorrie, the Graduate Liberal Studies program at Duke University, Peter and Debbie Kahn, Patricia and John Koskinen, Peter Lange and Lori Leachman, Ann Pelham and Robert Cullen, Barry Poss and Michele Pas, Tom Rankin and Jill McCorkle, Alan D. Schwartz and Nancy C. Seaman, Mary D.B.T. Semans, and Courtney Shives. We also thank Patty Morton, Joy and J.J. Kiser, Cookie and Henry Kohn, Michael Marsicano, Susan M. Stalnecker, Sallyan Windt, Karla F. and Russell Holloway, Jim Roberts, Robert J. Thompson, Jr., James L. and Florence Peacock III, W. Joseph and Ann Mann, Charles and Barbara Smith, Drs. Leela and Baba Prasad, Louise C. and Waltz Maynor, Joy and John Kasson, Dr. Assad Meymandi, and Alan B. Teasley.

For more information go to www.jazzloftproject.org.

In 1957, W. Eugene Smith, a former photographer at Life magazine, moved out of the home he shared with his wife and four children in Croton-on-Hudson, New York and moved into a dilapidated, five-story loft building at 821 Sixth Avenue in New York City’s wholesale flower district. 821 Sixth Avenue was a late-night haunt of musicians, including some of the biggest names in jazz—Charles Mingus, Zoot Sims, Bill Evans, and Thelonious Monk among them—and countless fascinating, underground characters. Between 1957 and 1965 W. Eugene Smith made approximately 40,000 exposures both inside the loft building at 821 Sixth Avenue, of the nocturnal jazz scene, and of the street below as seen through his fourth-floor window. He also wired the building like a surreptitious recording studio and made 1,740 reels (4,000 hours) of stereo and mono audiotapes, capturing more than three hundred musicians, among them Roy Haynes, Sonny Rollins, Bill Evans, Roland Kirk, Alice Coltrane, Don Cherry, and Paul Bley. He also recorded legends such as pianists Eddie Costa, and Sonny Clark, drummers Ronnie Free and Edgar Bateman, saxophonist Lin Halliday, bassist Henry Grimes, and multi-instrumentalist Eddie Listengart. The Jazz Loft Project: W. Eugene Smith in New York City, 1957-1965 was organized by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona and the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. For more information, please visit http://www.jazzloftproject.org/index.php.

Richard Avedon (1923-2004) set new precedents in fashion and portraiture for nearly seven decades. This exhibition of approximately 90 black and white photographs explores Avedon’s use of the camera to create images that helped to define fashion, theater, and movies as interrelated worlds that shared a similar visual vocabulary. His interest in performance began in the 1940s and 1950s with his early photographs of leading models in designer clothing for magazines such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. Taking his models out of the studio, Avedon combined the sophistication and glamour of haute couture with the excitement of modern life he celebrated in the streets of Paris, Rome, and New York.

His engaging and emotionally moving photographic images featured theatrical gestures, poses, and expressions combined with an attention to mise-en-scène. The dramatic elements in this work link his fashion photography to his interest in stage and cinema in New York and Hollywood. These photographs capture his enthusiasm for people engaged in roles that mesmerized and fascinated him, and they tell us as much about the relationship between performance and the body as they do about the people in them.

Drawn from the Collection of the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, the Palm Springs exhibition is organized by the Center for Creative Photography and the Palm Springs Art Museum. The exclusive presenting sponsor is the City of Indian Wells. Additional support provided by Annette Bloch, Helene Galen, Alan and Marilyn Pearl Loesberg, Yvonne and Steve Maloney, and the museum's Photography Collection Council.

Richard Avedon: Photographer of Influence, on view from May 21, 2011 through September 4, 2011, showcases more than 50 photographs by the legendary artist. The exhibition celebrates Avedon's storied career in which he embraced the worlds of both magazine and museum, pioneering a vision of photography as a two-sided mirror that reflects both the subject and the photographer. Richard Avedon: Photographer of Influence was organized by the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona with the cooperation of The Richard Avedon Foundation, New York. The installation of the exhibition at Nassau County Museum of Art will run alongside a presentation of fashion and photography in film.

Richard Avedon (1923-2004) was one of the great image-makers of the 20th century. He revolutionized fashion photography through his imaginative portrayals of modern women wearing extraordinary clothes in irresistible settings. Along with stylistic innovation, Avedon introduced a new emotional complexity to fashion photography by using the model's expressive gestures to evoke a greater narrative. His iconic images in Harper's Bazaar and Vogue showed the public a new American woman - one with wit, individuality and glamour.

Avedon created and defined the role of the high-profile portrait and fashion photographer. The 1957 film Funny Face - inspired by Richard Avedon's role in the postwar reconstruction of French glamour - cast Fred Astaire as fashion photographer "Dick Avery," and Audrey Hepburn as a naive young American transformed into an exquisite woman of haute couture. Avedon acted as visual consultant to the film, which features cameos by his favored models of the era: Dovima, Suzy Parker, and Sunny Harnett. The museum is showing Funny Face on Saturday, June 4. This outdoor screening at sundown is an event of the Gold Coast Film Festival.

Throughout his career, Avedon focused on portraiture in concert with, and in contrast to, his fashion work. Through his focus on expression and gesture, and obliteration of extraneous information, he produced resonant portraits that remain powerful depictions of humanity and history. His subjects included artists, politicians, writers, intellectuals and other influential figures of the day. The exhibition at Nassau County Museum of Art incorporates several of his most noted portraits of stars, including Marilyn Monroe, Ezra Pound, Bob Dylan, and Humphrey Bogart. Writing of portraiture for In the American West, one of his most highly regarded bodies of work, Avedon explained: "A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth."