Rhetoric of the Jazz Studio Portrait

ABSTRACT

This article explores the context and rhetoric of jazz studio portraiture between 1920–45. Often dismissed as publicity material, portraiture as a site of performative agency has been underestimated. These photographs were among the first conscious representations of jazz and tell us much about the emerging self-identity of jazz musicians. In a celebrity age exemplified by Hollywood glamor photography, portraiture was a key element in the negotiation with commercial entertainment and cultural modernity by both African American and white jazz musicians although the racialized entertainment discourse created sharp tensions for black players. Contrasted with the modernist photography emerging from the Hollywood studios however jazz portraits lacked the rhetorical certainty of celebrity discourse. The ambition of jazz portraiture to narrativize the place of jazz in relation to mass entertainment was consistently pulled between constructions of musical artistry and entertainment, between art and commerce, and its divorce from performance settings underscored these ambiguities. In providing scope for the performative agency of musicians, the rhetoric of jazz studio portraiture visualizes the complexities in the relationships between jazz and mainstream culture and undermines the simple antinomies often used to describe these relationships.

KEYWORDS:

• Jazz history
• jazz photography
• photographic rhetoric
• portraiture
• modernist photography

Acknowledgment

The author would like to thank Clyde Adams, James J. Kriegsmann Jr. Janis Bultman and Professor Larry Ray for their helpful comments on this article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Max Kozloff, The Theatre of the Face: Portrait Photography Since 1900 (London & New York: Phaidon Press, 2007), 7.

2 John Tagg, The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning (Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), xxvii.

3 Eric Porter, What Is This Thing Called Jazz? African American Musicians as Artists, Critics and Activists (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2002).

4 Peter Bacon Hales, Silver Cities: Photographing American Urbanization, 1839–1939 (Alberqueque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005), 16; J.-C. Lemagny and A. Rouillé, eds., A History of Photography: Social and Cultural Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 36–8; Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, The Noonday Press, 1989), 21–70.

5 Matthew Biro, “Documentary Photography,” in Encyclopaedia of Aesthetics, ed. Michael Kelly (London: Oxford University Press, 2014), 151.

6 John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Eassys on Photographies and Histories (London: MacMillan, 1988), 49. Richard Shusterman, “Photography as Performative Process,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 70, no. 1 (2012): 67–77 analyses the performative engagement of both photographer and sitter in portraiture modes.

7 Mary Warner Marien, Photography: A Cultural History, 3rd ed. (London: Laurence King Publishing, 2010). 62–3.

8 Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs, 54–5; Nancy Armstrong, “Realism before and after Photography: The Fantastical Form of a Relation among Things” in Adventures in Realism, ed. Matthew Beaumont (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 100; Ute Eskildsen, “Introduction,” in Street and Studio: An Urban HIstory of Photography (London: Tate Publishing, 2008), 11.

9 Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith, “Introduction,” in Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity, ed. Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith (Chapel Hill: Duke University Press, 2012), 4–5. See further Deborah Willis, Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers 1840 to the Present (New York & Oxford: W. W. Norton, 2000).

10 Andria Lisle, “Black and White: Three Photo Exhibits Bring the Long-Hidden World of Segregated Memphis to Life,” Memphis Flyer 1,886 (2006): 22; Rhea L. Combs, “Self-Representation and Hope: The Power of the Picture,” in Double Exposure: Through the African American Lens, ed. Rhea L. Combs (London: Giles, 2014), 10.

11 These photographs can be viewed in James Lincon Collier, Louis Armstrong: A Biography (London: Michael Joseph, 1984), 198–9; James Lincoln Collier, Duke Ellington: The Life and Times of the Restless Genius of Jazz (London: Pan Books, 1989), 166; Jeffrey Magee, Fletcher Henderson and Big Band Jazz: The Uncrowned King of Swing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 114 and Stanley Baron, Benny King of Swing: A Pictorial Biography (London: Thames & Hudson, 1979), n.pag.

12 John Raeburn, A Staggering Revolution: A Cultural History of Thirties Photography (Urbana and Chicago, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2006). See further Colin Osman and Jean-Claude Lemagny, “Photography Sure of Itself (1930-50),” in A History of Photography: Social and Cultural Perspectives, ed. Jean-Claude Lemagny and Andre Rouillé, trans. J. Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 165–86.

13 Raeburn, A Staggering Revolution, 12, 63–4.

14 Whitney Davis, A General Theory of Visual Culture (Princeton, NJ & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011), 76, 85. For the development of Hollywood studio photography see Robert Dance, “The Hollywood Studio Photographers,” in Glamour of the Gods: Photographs from the John Kobal Foundation, ed. Robert Dance and John Taylor (Göttingen: Steidl, 2008), 20–35; Mark A. Vieira, George Hurrell’s Hollywood: Glamour Portraits 1925–1992 (Philadelphia and London: Running Press, 2013); John Kobal, ed., Hollywood Glamour Portraits: 145 Photos of Stars 1926–1949 (New York: Dover Publications, 1976) and The Art of the Great Hollywood Portrait Photographers 1925–1940 (London: Allen Lane, 1980); and Clarence Sinclair Bull and Raymond Lee, The Faces of Hollywood (South Brunswick NJ and New York: A.S. Barnes and Company, 1968).

15 Bull quoted by Terence Pepper and John Kobal, The Man Who Shot Garbo: The Hollywood Photographs of Clarence Sinclair Bull (London: National Portrait Gallery Publications, 1989), 16.

16 W. Royal Stokes, Swing Era New York: The Jazz Photographs of Charles Peterson (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 178.

17 It has been argued that sound in the modern era had become inseparable from vision and that photographs provided a corrective in reembodying the music which early record buyers believed to have been disembodied in the recording process: Sam Halliday, Sonic Modernity: Representing Sound in Literature, Culture and the Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 3. See further W.J.T. Mitchell, “There Are No Visual Media,” Journal of Visual Culture 4, no. 2 (2005): 257–66; Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004) and Tony Whyton, “Four for Trane: Jazz and the Disembodied Voice,” Jazz Perspectives 1, no. 2 (2007): 115–16.

18 Ken Vail, Swing Era Scrapbook: The Teenage Diaries and Radio Logs of Bob Inman 1936–38 (Lanham & Oxford: Scarecrow Press, 2005), 2; Paul Bacon, “Jazz Fan,” in Black Beauty, White Heat: A Pictorial History of Jazz 1920-1950, ed. F. Driggs and H. Lewine (New York: Willian Morrow and Company, 1982), 8–18 for an account of the collecting and exchange mentality of jazz fans in the period.

19 Alan John Ainsworth, “Photographic Representations of Jazz: Testimonial Advertising in Down Beat, 1938-48,” Jazz Research Journal 11, no. 2 (2018): 111–52; Deac Rossell, “Mutoscope,” in The Oxford Companion to the Photograph, ed. Robin Lenman (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 430. For examples of Mutoscope cards see “Mutoscope Arcade Cards & Mutoscope Risqué Postcards,” LotsofCards.com, n.d., http://www.judnick.com/mutoscope.htm.

20 Frank Driggs and Harris Lewine, Black Beauty, White Heat: A Pictorial History of Jazz 1920–1950 (New York: Da Capo, 1995), 114; R. Collins, New Orleans Jazz: A Revised History (New York: Vantage Press, 1996), 239. Alyn Shipton, The Art of Jazz: A Visual History (Watertown, MA: Imagine Publishing, 2020), 23 illustrates early sheet music covers. A publicity poster is reproduced in “No Title,” The Jazz Archivist 3, no. 1 (1988). See also Sandor Demlinger and John Steiner, Destination Chicago Jazz (Stroud: Tempus, 2003), 157 and Collier, Louis Armstrong, 173.

21 Caroline Seebohm, The Man Who Was Vogue (New York: Viking Press, 1982), 195–208.

22 Meyer Shapiro, “Style,” in Anthropology Today: An Encyclopedic Inventory, ed. Al. L. Kroeber (Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 287; Margaret Finch, Style in Art History: An Introduction to Theories of Style and Sequence (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1974), 46.

23 Judith Brown, “Garbo’s Glamour,” in Modernist Star Maps: Celebrity, Modernity, Culture, ed.Aaron Jaffe and Jonathan Goldman (London & New York: Routledge, 2010), 109; Alicia Annas, “The Photogenic Formula: Hairstyles and Makeup in Historical Films,” in Hollywood and History: Costume Design in Film (Los Angeles, CA: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1987), esp. 60–1.

24 Hayden Carruth, Sitting In: Selected Writings on Jazz, Blues and Related Topics (Iowa City, IA: Iowa State University Press, 1993), 11.

25 W. Fitzhugh Brundage, “Working in the ‘Kingdon of Culture’ African Americans and Popular Culture, 1890-1930,” in Beyond Blackface: African Americans and the Creation of American Popular Culture 1890-1930, ed. W. Fitzhugh Brundage (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 2–31; Scott DeVeaux, “Putting the History Back into Jazz,” The Mississippi Quarterly 47, no. 2 (1994): 270.

26 Burton W. Peretti, Jazz in American Culture (Chicago, Illinois: Ivan R. Dee, 1997), 120.

27 Examples of each can be seen in Magee, Fletcher Henderson and Big Band Jazz: 114; Stuart Nicholson, A Portrait of Duke Ellington: Reminiscing in Tempo (London: Pan Books, 2000), 170 and Frank Driggs and Harris Lewine, Black Beauty, White Heat: A Pictorial History of Jazz 1920–1950 (New York: Da Capo, 1995), 93, 130 and 300; Orin Keepnews and Bill Grauer Jr., A Pictorial History of Jazz: People and Places from New Orleans to Modern Jazz (Feltham, Middlesex: Spring Books, 1968), 44; Stanley Baron, Benny King of Swing: A Pictorial Biography (London: Thames & Hudson, 1979). n.pag.

28 T. Stoddard, ed., Pops Foster: The Autobiography of a New Orleans Jazzman (Berkeley, CA and London: University of California Press, 1971), 76.

29 Gunther Schuller quoted by W. Royal Stokes, The Jazz Scene: An Informal History From New Orleans to 1990 (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 29.

30 Rising professional standards came as a shock to some New Orleans musicians who “ … had rarely thought of themselves as professionals, living as manual labourers who also played weekend gigs.” William H. Kenney, Chicago Jazz: A Cultural History, 1904–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 40–41.

31 Kenney, Chicago Jazz, 85–6.

32 Court Carney, Cuttin’ Up: How Early Jazz Got America’s Ear (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2009), 9; Lawrence W. Levine, “Jazz and American Culture,” Journal of American Folklore 102, no. 403 (1989): 6–22. Maureen Anderson, “The White Reception of Jazz in America,” African American Review 38, no. 1 (2004): 135–45.

33 Thomas Brothers, Louis Armstrong: Master of Modernism (New York & London: W. W. Norton, 2014). 130–32, 441.

34 Collier, Louis Armstrong: A Biography,203; Ben Sidran, Black Talk (New York: Da Capo, 1981), 54; Chadwick Hansen, “Social Influences on Jazz Style: Chicago, 1920-30,” American Quarterly 12, no. 4 (1960): 493–507, Thomas J Hennessey, “The Black Chicago Establishment 1919-1930,” Journal of Jazz Studies, 1974 and the rejoinder by William Walling, “The Politics of Jazz: Some Preliminary Notes,” Journal of Jazz Studies 2, no. 1 (1974): 46–60.

35 Ingrid Monson, “The Problem with White Hipness: Race, Gender, and Cultural Conceptions in JazzHistorical Discourse,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 48, no. 3 (1995): 407.

36 Details from MGM publicity release attached to the photograph verso.

37 Reed’s studio was captured in a photograph made by Ansel Adams as part of a series of 217 photographs showing everyday life, businesses, street scenes and aerospace employees in Los Angeles. It was commissioned by Fortune magazine and is in the Ansel Adams Collection at Los Angeles Public Library.

38 Frank Crowninshield in Vanity Fair quoted by Robert Dance and Bruce Robertsdon, Ruth Harriet Louise and Hollywood Glamour Photography (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 113.

39 These photographs are reproduced in James Lincoln Collier, Benny Goodman and the Swing Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 244 and Baron, Benny King of Swing: A Pictorial Biography, n.pag.

40 David Shields, “G. Maillard Kesslere,” Broadway Photographs, n.d., https://www.broadway.cas.sc.edu/content/g-maillard-kesslere. Maillard Kesslere’s part in Helena Rubenstein’s “modernist display” is discussed by Marie J. Clifford, “Helena Rubenstein’s Beauty Salons, Fashion and Modernist Display,” Winterthur Portfolio 38, no. 2–3 (2003): 83–108.

41 The photograph of Berton is reproduced in Driggs and Lewine, Black Beauty, White Heat, 103.

42 Edward Maeder, ed., Hollywood and History: Costume Design in Film (Los Angeles: Thames & Hudson/LA County Museum of Art, 1987), 36.

43 The most complete biography of Korman is provided by Clyde Adams, “The One Big Name,” Murray Korman Photography, 2017, accessed 3 February 2019 https://www.murraykorman.com/bio. See also John Ferris, “Dancers or Deb, Korman’s Lens Pleases Them All,” Baltimore Sun, June 1, 1941, p. 10.

44 Obituary, “Maurice Seymour: Photographed Stars,” Chicago Tribune, October 9, 1993, 19; Joseph Haas, “The Saga Behind the Signature, ‘Maurice Seymour, Chicago,’” Chicago Daily News, May 11, 1968; David Shields, “Maurice Seymour,” Broadway Photographs, accessed January 15, 2019, https://www.broadway.cas.sc.edu/content/maurice-seymour.

45 Susan Bernard, “Introduction,” in Bernard of Hollywood (Koln, London and New York: Taschen, 2002), 7–14; Ann V. Masters, “Behind the Star-Studded Camera: Bruno of Hollywood,” Bridgeport Sunday Post, September 21, 1969, E1 and Suzanne Muchnic, “Bernard: He Wanted Out, Is Now In,” Los Angeles Times-Calendar, January 8, 1984, 4.

46 Estimate provided by James J. Kriegsmann Jr. in an interview with the author, October 18, 2018. Quotation from the same interview. See further Janis Bultman, “James J. Kriegsmann: An Eye for Entertainers,” in Legacies: Interviews with Masters of Photography (Coralville, IA: Quercus Agrifolia Press, Kindle ed., 2018), n.pag.

47 I am grateful to Peter Vacher for the point about Illinois Jacquet. Vincent M. Mallozzi, “Behind the Lens, Continuing a Legacy,” New York Times, January 11, 2010, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/11/nyregion/11photog.html.

48 Regina A. Perry, “Introduction”, in James VanDerZee, ed. by Liliane De Cock and Reginald McGhee (Dobbs Ferry, NY: Morgan & Morgan, 1973); Jim Haskins, James Van Der Zee: The Picture Takin’ Man (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1991) and Camille Billops and Owen Dodson, The Harlem Book of the Dead (Dobbs Ferry, NY: Morgan & Morgan, 1978).

49 As early as 1914 Elcha was being hailed in the black press for his work as a retoucher at Rembrandt’s, a leading New York Studio. “Photographic Retoucher,” New York Age, September 3 1914, 1. Elcha was subsequently mentioned in the press on many occasions. See for example Staff Photographer, “Elcha’s Work Known from Coast to Coast,” Pittsburgh Courier, 7 June 1924 and “Courier Reporter Surveys Broadway,”Pittsburgh Courier, February 4 1928, 1.

50 See example in Shipton, The Art of Jazz, 55.

51 Amy Mooney, “‘Visions of Great Usefulness and Progress’: A Chicago Photographer’s Studio and Black Modern Subjectivity,” Courtauld Institute of Art, 2019, https://courtauld.ac.uk/event/visions-of-great-usefulness-and-progress-modern-black-subjectivity-through-a-mid-twentieth-century-chicago-photographers-studio; Amy M. Mooney, “Photos of Style and Dignity: Woodard’s Studios and the Delivery of Black Modern Subjectivity,” in Beyond the Face: New Perspectives on Portraiture, ed. Wendy Wick Reaves (Washington, D.C.: National Portrait Gallery, 2018), 214.

52 The Hines and Mallory photographs are reproduced in Driggs and Lewine, Black Beauty, White Heat: 71–2.

53 Arthur Frank Wertheim, Vaudeville Wars: How the Keith-Albee and the Orpheum Circuits Controlled the Big-Time and Its Performers (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006), 95–6. On the Kansas City theatrical portraiture style see David S. Shields, “Kansas City Style: The Artist’s Hand and the Vaudeville Portrait 1912-1930,” Broadway Photographs, accessed February 9, 2019, https://www.broadway.cas.sc.edu/content/kansas-city-style-artists-hand-and-vaudeville-portrait-1912-1930.

54 The Keppard and Williams photographs are reproduced in Driggs and Lewine, Black Beauty, White Heat: 52, 156.

55 See for instance Nossett’s advertisements in the Wichita Daily Times, March 12 1922, 4.

56 The Beiderbecke and Armstrong photographs are reproduced in Richard M. Sudhalter, Philip R. Evans, and William Dean-Myatt, Bix: Man & Legend (London: Quartet Books, 1974), 59 and Collier, Louis Armstrong, 198–99.

57 Martin Williams, Jazz in Its TIme (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 177; Thomas Brothers, Louis Armstrong: Master of Modernism (New York & London: W. W. Norton, 2014), 70–115; James L. Dickerson, Just for a Thrill: Lil Harin Armstrong, First Lady of Jazz (Jackson, MS: Sartoris Literary Group, 2001), esp. 124-6, 133-35,147 and 184.

58 Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff, Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya (New York: Dover Books, 1955), 109.

59 The Jewish Sentinel, Vol.18 (1) 1915, 15; “Plans Studio Building on Sheridan Road Lot,” Chicago Sunday (CST) tribune, Nov 27 1921, Pt.2 p.5; CST, October 20 1929, Pt.1, 11.

60 CST, May 23 1926, Pt1, 3.

61 Bentley Historical Library, “Lens on Gibson,” Magazine, accessed December 1, 2019, https://bentley.umich.edu/news-events/magazine/lens-on-gibson/.

62 David S. Shields, “Apeda Studio,” Broadway Photographs, n.d., https://www.broadway.cas.sc.edu/content/studio-apeda; Casetext, “White Studio, Inc. v Dreyfoos,” 1913, https://casetext.com/case/white-studio-inc-v-dreyfoos.

63 See for example the photographs showing Cheatham reproduced in Frank Driggs and Harris Lewine, Black Beauty, White Heat: A Pictorial History of Jazz 1920–1950 (New York: Da Capo, 1995), 57, 63, 109, 135, 209, 230, 232 and 258. Cheatham confirmed that “In Nashville we had no way of listening to any jazz, other than the very few records that were coming out”: Michael Ullman, Jazz Lives: Portraits in Words and PIctures (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1980), 18.

64 Roland Barthes, “The Rhetoric of the Image,” in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven: Leet’s Island Books, 1989), 269–85.

65 David Bate, Photography: The Key Concepts (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2009), 80.

66 Rosalind E. Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October 8 (1979): 34. The limits of photographic modernism are discussed by George Baker, “Photography between Narrative and Stasis: August Sander, Degeneration and the Decay of the Portrait,” October, no. 76 (1966): 73–113.

67 Nigel Thrift, “Understanding the Material Practices of Glamour,” in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2010), 296–7.

68 Astrid Huopalainen, “Manipulating Surface and Producing ‘Effortless’ Elegance-Analysing the Social Organisation of Glamour,” Culture and Organization, 2016, 4; Virginia Postrel, The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture and Consciousness (New York: Harper Collins, 2003), 28; Mary Desjardins, “‘Marion Never Looked Lovelier’: Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood and the Negotiation of Glamour in Post-War Hollywood,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 16, no. 3–4 (1999): 424.

69 Thrift, “Material Practices of Glamour,” 292, 296-7; Judith Brown, Glamour in Six Dimensions: Modernism and the Radiance of Form (Ithica, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 2009), 73.

70 “An ideal type is formed by the one-sided accentuation of one or more points of view and by the synthesis of a great many diffuse, discrete, more or less present and occasionally absent concrete individual phenomena according to which concrete individual phenomena are … arranged into a unified analytical construct.” Max Weber, “Objectivity in Social Science and Social Policy,” in Max Weber on The Methodology of the Social Sciences, ed. E. A. Shils and H. A. Finch (New York: Free Press, 1949), 90.

71 Gregory Clark, Civic Jazz: American Music and Kenneth Burke on the Art of Getting Along (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), esp. 22–33.

72 Or, perhaps more accurately, to connote what Peter Townsend (following Barthes) calls “jazzicity,” “ … the construct resulting from the ensemble of visual signs (among instruments, saxophones and double bases typically signify jazz)” which have come to assume the identity of the music. Peter Townsend, Jazz in American Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 166.

73 E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art, 14th. edition (Oxford: Phaidon, 1984), 6.

74 Georg Simmel, “The Aesthetic Significance of the Face,” in George Simmel 1858-1918: A Collection of Essays (Columbus, OH.: Ohio State University Press, 1959), 276–81; Angus Trumble, A Brief HIstory of the Smile (New York: Basic Books, 2003); Ben Maddow, Faces: A Narrative History of the Portrait in Photography (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1977); Nicholas Jeeves, “The Serious and the Smirk: The Smile in Portraiture,” Public Domain Review, 2013, https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/the-serious-and-the-smirk-the-smile-in-portraiture; and Lisa Slattery Rashotte, “What Does That Smile Mean? The Meaning of Nonverbal Behaviors in Social Interaction,” Social Psychology Quarterly 65, no. 1 (2002): 92–102.

75 Tanya Sheehan, “Looking Pleasant, Feeling White: The Social Politics of the Photographic Smile,” in Feeling Photography, ed. Elspeth H. Brown and Thy Phu (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 144; David S. Shields, Still: American Silent Motion Picture Photography (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

76 Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 23; Sheehan, “Looking Pleasant, Feeling White: The Social Politics of the Photographic Smile,” 142.

77 Catherine M. Cole and Tracy C. Davis, “Routes of Blackface,” TDR 57, no. 2 (2013): 8.

78 Christina Kotchemidova, “From Good Cheer to ‘Drive-By-Smiling’: A Social History of Cheerfulness,” Journal of Social History 39, no. 1 (2005): 13; Christina Kotchemidova, “Why We Say ‘Cheese’: Producing the Smile in Snapshot Photography,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 22, no. 1 (2005): 2–25; Fred E. H. Schroeder, “Say Cheese! The Revolution in the Aesthetics of Smiles,” Journal of Popular Culture 32, no. 2 (2004): 103–45.

79 James Lincoln Collier, Louis Armstrong: An American Genius (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 157.

80 Joe Glaser on Louis Armstrong, Life, April 15 1966 cited by Collier, 289.

81 Alfred Appel, Jazz Modernism: From Ellington and Armstrong to Matisse and Joyce, vol. 11 (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 2005), 198; Sidran, Black Talk, 60-1; Thomas Brothers, Louis Armstrong: Master of Modernism (New York & London: W. W. Norton, 2014), 438, 444.

82 See Eric Porter’s analysis of Armstrong’s biography in Porter, What Is This Thing Called Jazz? African American Musicians as Artists, Critics and Activists, 44–5.

83 J. D. Smith and Len Guttridge, Jack Teagarden (London: Jazz Book Club, 1962), 105–6, 108.

84 Alphonso D. McClendon, Fashion and Jazz: Dress, Identity and Subcultural Improvisation (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015), 135.

85 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (London: Vintage Books, 2000), 42–5; Carol Tulloch, The Birth of Cool: Style Narratives of the African Diaspora (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 95–7. Carson’s photographs can be found in Robert O’Meally, Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday (New York: Arcade, 1991), 8 and David Margolick, Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Café Society and an Early Cry for Civil Rights (Philadelphia & London: Running Press Books, 2000), 72–3.

86 Dizzy Gillespie and Al Fraser, To Be, or Not … to Bop (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979), 296.

87 Christopher J. Wells, “‘You Can’t Dance to It,’” Daedalus 148, no. 2 (2019): 46–7.

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Alan John Ainsworth

Dr. Alan John Ainsworth is an independent scholar whose work spans architecture, design, jazz and photographic history. His most recent architectural book was Brussels Art Nouveau: Architecture and Design (Unicorn Press, 2016). In the field of jazz and photography he has published a number of scholarly articles and his book, Sight Reading: Photographers and American Jazz 1900-1960, will be published by Intellect Books/Intellect University of Chicago in late-2021.