“I was completely overwhelmed by jazz as a result of I knew that was America,” the photographer Lisette Mannequin as soon as mentioned. America is many issues—pleasure and ache, freedom and repression—and Mannequin’s pictures of jazz musicians and their audiences captured the total vary. Mannequin, a Viennese Jewish émigré, is greatest identified at the moment for her avenue images, however within the early Fifties, she got down to create a e book of jazz photos, with an accompanying essay to be written by Langston Hughes. However because the artwork historian Audrey Sands writes in an essay included in a brand new e book of Mannequin’s picturessuspicion of her leftist politics led to the challenge’s collapse; Mannequin herself was investigated by the FBI and Senator Joseph McCarthy. When she died in 1983, Mannequin left behind some 1,800 negatives from her jazz challenge, most of which have been by no means printed.
Lisette Mannequin*
Miles Davis at Café Bohemia in New York Metropolis, 1957
Lisette Mannequin*
Artwork Taylor at Café Bohemia, 1957
Lisette Mannequin*
Billie Vacation on the New York Jazz Pageant, 1957
Mannequin liked to doc audiences in moments of rapture. What jumps out in her photos of musicians, nevertheless, is the wariness of their eyes and gestures—even from the courtly Duke Ellington. “I do know of no photographer who has photographed folks as inwardly as Lisette Mannequin,” the photographer Berenice Abbott wrote. Maybe shared experiences of persecution related Mannequin, who had fled the Nazis in Europe, along with her topics. Even because the U.S. authorities used jazz to advertise America’s picture overseas, the style’s luminaries suffered racism and violence at house. Miles Davis was brutally crushed by a police officer throughout a break in one in every of his personal reveals at a Manhattan nightclub, the worst of many incidents with legislation enforcement all through his profession. The drummer Artwork Taylor ultimately relocated to France, the place he and lots of different Black musicians sought higher situations. Billie Vacation, who for years had been harassed by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, was arrested as she lay dying of liver and coronary heart illness within the hospital. Mannequin took a collection of poignant postmortem images of Vacation, then by no means shot one other jazz picture once more.
By Lisette Mannequin
*Pictures of Davis, Ellington, Nance, and Taylor: © Lisette Mannequin Basis, courtesy of Eakins Press Basis / Lisette Mannequin fonds, Nationwide Gallery of Canada Library and Archives
{Photograph} of Vacation: © Lisette Mannequin Basis, courtesy of Eakins Press Basis / The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
This text seems within the October 2025 print version with the headline “Jazz Legends.”
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