18
Drum: PHOTOGENIC
He never told his brother what he had seen
that day, but he pestered him for a camera and
got to borrow an old Box Brownie. He added
a roll of film, pointed the thing and went
outside. His first ever pictures were of his
friends playing baseball in the yard. The next
day they were developed and printed and he
gave the prints away. All of a sudden he
became a very popular young boy indeed. It
was this same tactic that Herman used years
later to gain unrestricted access to the late
greats of jazz.
It really wasn’t an exploratory thing about
different cultures that dragged him into the
heart of America’s black jazz scene. You can
see it too in Herman’s ‘jazz work’ which came
about beause he really liked the music.
Photography was a way for him to get into the
clubs for nothing and get up close to the
musicians.
When we think of the Harlem Renaissance,
apartheid in South Africa, the great jazz years
or the civil rights movement in America, we
“ I dreamt as a child of being Marco Polo. I wanted to travel all
over the world and delve into other cultures and ethnic groups,
and all that fascinated me.”
For many people, the photography of Herman
Leonard is their first link to jazz culture.
Classic portraits of Dexter with a Chesterfield,
Duke in Paris, Billie and her dog, Mister, Miles
in Malibu, Satchmo in Birdland ...These
images, in some cases more so than the
music, are responsible for our devotion to
preserving and protecting the art that
musicians of mid 20th Century America
created, and Herman was there to report it.
often notice the coming together of great
black and Jewish artists and activists. I asked
him what he thought it was that often brings
these two groups of people together.
“Poverty!” he says, bluntly. “If you’re black
you have two strikes against you right away. If
you’re Jewish you have a strike and a half
against you right away. But minorities,
certainly in those days, had a very difficult »