The Jazz People of New Orleans

by Lee Friedlander

Lee Friedlander's reputation is founded upon an enormous diversity of his photographs range from landscapes to portraits, from street scenes to nudes, from industrial sites to flowers. This new book reflects another of his passionate interests - music - especially the musicians of New Orleans whom he has been photographing since 1957.
New Orleans, birthplace of jazz, was once home to such legends as Louis Armstrong and King Joe Oliver. Friedlander has photographed most of them, musicians like Manuel "Fess" Manetta, who was playing with bands before World War I and who once tried to teach Louis Armstrong to play with two trumpets at once. Here are Johnny St. Cyr, George "Kid Sheik" Cola, Sweet Emma Barrett, Isidore Barbarin and Roosevelt Sykes, blues singers and guitarists Robert Pete Williams and Snooks Eaglin. From the portraits we move out into the streets, to the marching bands like Young Tuxedo and Eureka, following Friedlander's eye to the edge of funerals until, finally, we are immersed in the rhythm of the city itself.
Many of Friedlander's subjects are encountered in an afterword by Whitney Balliett, America's foremost writer on jazz, who describes a visit he made to the city in the mid-sixties. The Jazz People of New Orleans is a remarkable testament, by a virtuoso photographer, to a city whose musical tradition is at the heart of American culture.

Genres: Photography, Music, Art, Jazz, History

119 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Lee Friedlander is a seminal American photographer known for his innovative images of city streets. Often featuring candid portraits of people, signs, and reflections of himself in store front windows, Friedlander’s street photography captures the unexpected overlaps of light and content in urban landscapes. “I’m not a premeditative photographer,” he has said. “You don’t have to go looking for pictures. The material is generous. You go out and the pictures are staring at you.”

Born on July 14, 1934 in Aberdeen, WA, he studied at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena before moving to New York in 1956. Influenced by the work of Eugène Atget and Walker Evans, he attempted to see things as if a step removed, spontaneously reacting to all the potential images in front of him. Along with Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand, Friedlander was represented in the historic “New Documents” exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in 1967, curated by John Szarkowski. He went on to publish his acclaimed photobook The American Monument in 1976. More recently, in 2010, Friedlander published America by Car, a book which was accompanied by an exhibition at the Whitney Museum and featured a series of photos that were taken on road trips from behind the wheel of rental cars. The artist continues to live and work in New York, NY. Today, his photographs are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, among others.

Reviews

[Greg]

New Orleans was the only American city with an authentic, unique identity up until the human-caused catastrophe after Hurricane Katrina occurred. Now it's a more a Disneyland-version of itself, more homogenized, less distinctive. I lived for a number of years in the Irish Channel, the old working-class neighborhood between the Garden District, home of the wealthiest old money in the city, and the Mississippi River. Today, post-Katrina, it’s a mix of poverty and gentrification that only New Orleans could create.

In the 1970s and 1980s it was still fairly common to have a street parade break out or a jazz funeral in some neighborhood in the city, the Irish Channel included. These were expressions of New Orleans’ Black heritage that was adopted by every cultural influence in the city.

This collection of photographs by Lee Friedlander, mostly from the early 1970s, captures an era that no longer exists. It wasn’t for tourists; it was for locals. You can see their authenticity in every photograph. Better than any “influencer” post could ever approach.

[Paul Secor]

I'll have to get some recordings on the American Music label to serve as a sound track while I look at these photographs.

[Jeff Crompton]

Lee Friedlander is one of my favorite photographers, and this is a wonderful book - especially for those of us who love the music of New Orleans. The photographs aren't dated, but based on when some of the subjects died and the way others are dressed, they range from the 1950s to the late 1970s, or perhaps the '80s. In any case, there are many pleasures here. The second half of the book is dedicated to photographs of the city's brass bands and of the second-liners who follow them.

As an added bonus, the book includes "Mecca, La.," an essay Whitney Balliett wrote for The New Yorker in the mid-1960s. Balliett was guided through the New Orleans scene by jazz historian Richard Allen, and wrote as fine an account of the city's music of that time as can be found.

[Nathan Phillips]

Beautiful collection of Friedlander’s monochrome photographs of New Orleans in the ’50s and ’60s. The photos radiate with loss but also with the weight of cultural wisdom and greatness. Whitney Balliett’s afterword is brilliant; still, it’s a coffee table book and it’s more striking as a piece of photographic art than as historical document, apart from Balliett’s comments.

[Julie Grace Immink]

A perfect melody