22 - Two Dark Rooms

Summary

Jazz photographs are evidentiary documents, nostalgic memorials, and contributors to a romantic mythology and mystique. Sight and sound are combined and made more potent by mutual association. But classic jazz photographs do not exist in the realm of myth alone. Jazz photographs intersected with trends in portraiture, documentary, and advertising during the peak decades of the music’s popularity. They described the social contours of the music– the places where it was heard and the communities formed around it. And images helped sell the music, whether promoting performances or recordings. Photographs also made African American artistic innovation more obvious as the drive for equality gained momentum. The symbiotic relationship between the two art forms has been strengthened over more than one hundred years. Publicity portraiture, photojournalism, album cover imagery, street photography, African American photography, and archival and exhibition curation have all probed the music’s deep beauty for visual analogues and associations.