Abstract
Alan Ainsworth is an independent writer and professional photographer who works in fields of architecture, design, jazz and photographic history. Sight Readings is the outcome of at least 10 years of research and travel across the USA collecting photos and other archives and interviewing musicians and photographers. With a foreword by Darius Brubeck, the discission is structured into 10 chapters that move both thematically and chronologically through the period, developing a key theme of the book, that is, visualizing the sounds of jazz. This nuanced and erudite photographic history of jazz is supported by 136 jazz photographs. Its focus is on the formative period of both jazz and photography from the turn of the 20th century to 1960, though strays both back and forwards from these dates. Central to the narrative here is that this was also the period of segregation and the emerging struggles for civil rights along with the assertion of black identity within which jazz was crucially situated. It is difficult to do justice to this wide ranging and complex book in a brief review. The level of erudition and the breadth of discussion of jazz and photography that weaves together themes of race and migration, struggles for visibility, changing musical techniques all informed by a passion for jazz, are extremely impressive. There are some thoughtful reflections on the role of émigré Jewish jazz photographers (Ch. 9) that has hardly been touched on in the jazz literature, who brought a perspective ‘from the edge’, of defamiliarization, dislocation and explored new forms of spatial representation. Sight Readings also maintains a sociological argument about reflexivity and agency that is elaborated in an appendix and informs his analysis but it is kept in the background for the more general reader. Ainsworth aims though to move beyond ideas of a mutual dependence of agency and structure and see jazz photography as a site of human agency that subsequently becomes as Sontag put it, a memento mori.
The jazz performance and portrait photographer Lee Tanner wrote of a ‘magnificent synergism’ between jazz and photography (p. 89). Indeed, Ainsworth shows that jazz is an art form whose entire existence has been both documented and expressed through photography which renders these photographs among the most valuable visual records in modern American history. Jazz photos are rich in mimetic detail and infused with expressive signs so that jazz photography inherently combines a documentary function with cultural meanings emanating from the combined effect of the subject matter and the specific modalities of the medium (p. 61). More specifically, photos both copy and invent the world at the same time while, as in techniques of photo elicitation, stimulating recollections and narratives, which feature prominently in Sight Readings.
The embodiment of jazz is critically inflected by racial divisions. Until the 1940s, white players were heavily represented in specialist media such as Down Beat and Metronome although there were various forms of resistance to this such as photos of interracial bands especially in jam sessions (p. 70). In mid-century, there were increasing numbers of black and migrant Jewish photographers who gave black musicians increased visibility. Many photos of black and interracial bands (and of women jazz players) were not published in the music media but now enable historians to write counter-histories of the genre, to which in many respects this book is dedicated. These photos allow the tracing of the development of musical identities and the increasing assertiveness of black identities – for example Cab Calloway’s zoot suit was an emblem of ethnicity and identity for black Harlem youth in the 1940s. This was an effective mode of challenging racial ideologies and for African-Americans to enter spaces of representation, ‘seeing ourselves as sharp’ expressing authenticity. They were not, though, sending messages to white people but to each other, as D’Army Baily put it (p. 171). From the 1920s black jazz culture linked up with the politics of resistance such as Harlem Renaissance (p. 230) and appealed to readers of the black press (such as Ebony and the Chicago Defender) filling a visual space with alternative images speaking to a modern urban future (p. 231). From the 1930s onwards African-American photographers such as Al Smith began exploring streets and black spaces beyond their studios developing an expressive realism rather than promotional portraits. These were also part of a rebellion against the staid mores of the older generation and which increasingly crossed racial divides. Even so, one of the most poignant photos in the book is of Louis Armstrong in 1960 taken by Herb Snitzer on his tour bus. Already the most famous entertainer in the USA, Armstrong had been refused entry to a whites-only bathroom in Connecticut. Isolated, since the background is blurred, the image draws the viewer into Armstrong’s eyes as he stares directly into the camera. Snitzer captured and froze the weary defiance but also hurt and injury of racism.
Jazz is a broad genre, and even in the period considered here, ranged from swing to the abstract experimental work of John Coltrane, which raises the much-debated question of the boundary between jazz/not jazz. This is touched on in Chapter 10 looking forward to newer hybrid forms, but is not particularly developed. It might have been interesting to consider Adorno’s critique of ‘jazz’, which referred largely to white swing in Weimar. This does though raise a further issue in relation to both music and photography of the autonomy of art as opposed to the subjectivity of its maker. Many who try to resolve the problem of subjectivity and objective meanings end up leaning one way or the other. Sight Readings is informed by a bold project of transcending the dichotomy but its ‘central problem’ is the photographer’s intentions as a starting point for deep interpretation and historical reconstruction (p. 359). This is done consummately but, in the process, perhaps leans more to the agency of the photographer than how cultural products take on their own autonomous life beyond their makers, so that the meanings of the images and the music they represent have subsequently been transformed. Really though a minor quibble. Sight Readings is a milestone in research on photography and American jazz.