Herman Leonard: making music with light

African American Review, Summer, 1995 by Kalamu ya Salaam

ya Salaam: Not many photographers have been able to capture the feel and texture of jazz as you have.

Leonard: I'm glad to hear that, because it wasn't consciously done that way. I think the difference between my work and other photographers' is that I didn't depend on it for a living, and maybe they did. So if they had an assignment to go out and shoot a subject, they had to come out with a photograph that was lit in such a manner that it would reproduce well on news-stock paper. That wasn't my consideration at all. I didn't have anybody to answer to but myself - no editors, no critics, nothing.

ya Salaam: So, why did you do it?

Leonard: 'Cause I loved the music. Also, it was my way of getting away from the monotony of the daily routine of photography. I was doing portraits, and some magazine work which was interesting, but I really loved the jazz.

ya Salaam: Some musicians have a favorite instrument, some photographers have a favorite camera. Was that the case with you in terms of doing the jazz photographs?

Leonard: Yeah! My favorite camera was the old speed graphic, that 4 x 5, handheld, large monstrous thing that you see in a lot of black-and-white films from the '40s and '50s. It was that newspaper man's camera - great big thing you held with two hands and it had a big flash on the side.

ya Salaam: Why that one?

Leonard: Because you had to take your time. You could only take a certain amount of pictures in one night, physically I mean. The camera didn't have roll film. It had 4 x 5 slides. You could only carry so many film packs physically unless you were a horse. So if I went out to shoot something at the Roost or Birdland, I knew that I could not snap more than twenty or thirty pictures for the whole night. You had to be really careful and take your time about what you were shooting, compose it well and wait for the right moment. Sometimes I'd go for many nights without having a good shot. I would go home, process the stuff, and throw it away. In time you get up a collection of good shots. When you work with smaller cameras you have a tendency to overshoot, hoping to catch that moment, and you end up with a lot of junk.

ya Salaam: You said "compose," how does one compose something as spontaneous and free flowing as jazz?

Leonard: You look, you just look. I think that when a musician or a musical composer sits down to compose a piece he will get the general outline of what he is doing and then he'll refine it, listen to it back, and make the changes that he wants. When I'm sitting there in front of a drummer or sax player, I look. I look at the angles. I look at the light. I look at the background. And being disciplined by using a large camera, you have to look. You don't look into the camera, you look at the subject. You feel the composition within the frame within which you're working, and you do it to your own liking. I happen to like a certain style. I like back lighting because it sets the subject off from the background, especially if the background is dark, which most of the clubs were. I like light that goes around the subject and not flat lighting.

ya Salaam: All right, but given the club setting, how do you achieve these lighting effects that most people would only try in a studio?

Leonard: I became friends with the club owners.

ya Salaam: What does that have to do with photography?

Leonard: I had my training with Karsh of Canada. I was a photographer and I went to school for it, but I went to Canada and spent a year as an apprentice with Yousuf Karsh, a Canadian of Armenian descent. He's the greatest portrait photographer in the world. His portraits are so incredible that five hundred years from now, if we lost all traces of that individual, someone could take one of his portraits and do a three-dimensional sculpture. That's how well he captures the texture, the detail, and the essence of the personality of the people he photographs. He taught me to look for certain things, and that's what I look for, especially in my music work. I wanted to capture the atmosphere of the club. I wanted to capture the feeling of a particular musician, if it could be done in a graphic form rather than an audio form. Everybody was there with microphones and tape recorders; I was there with a camera. I wanted to capture the music, but I had to interpret it with black and white, with light, with shades and shadows. The fact that people react to my pictures the way they do now, which is a total surprise to me, to be honest with you ... these pictures were just lying around in a box for all these years. I never did anything with them because nobody ever paid me any money for them, and I had to make money for the family by doing other things like mail order catalogues. When I was starving a couple of years ago, I dug these out hoping to sell a few and people reacted. Now, I see what they see.

ya Salaam: At the time you didn't?

Leonard: No. To be very honest, I was not aware that I had captured so essentially the spirit of the times in those clubs.