Great pictures, great atmosphere in an audio slide show on the NY Times site not to be missed W Eugene Smith and the Jazz Loft Project. There is also a short introduction to it by Jeffrey Scales elsewhere on the NYT site.
This was Smith’s largest project – a thousand or more rolls of film and countless hours of audio which took seven years for Sam Stephenson to research, producing a book, a radio series (I’m listening to the introduction as I write) and an exhibition, currently at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center until May 22, 2010 and later at the Chicago Cultural Center (July 17-September 25, 2010), the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University (February 3-May 22, 2011), the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego (May 19-Oct. 7, 2012), and the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona (late 2012, early 2013).
It’s a shame that at the moment there are no plans for this exhibition to come to Europe.
Smith was one of the first photographers I wrote about on line, and in many ways a legend in photography, not least for almost managing to bankrupt Magnum. He was also in some ways a very American photographer, not least because it was the attitudes in the US to press photography that his career was very much a battle against. In Europe at the time things were rather less ossified.