The Jazz Loft Project Radio Series debuts this week on WNYC: "In 1957, photographer W. Eugene Smith moved into a loft at 821 Sixth Avenue. It became a hangout for artists, writers and especially jazz musicians, who rehearsed and jammed there. By the time Smith left the loft more than a decade later he had documented the activity there through 40,000 photos and roughly 4,000 hours of audio tape."
The project—in addition to the radio series, there is a book and an exhibition—started thirteen years ago, when Sam Stephenson's wife bought him a camera for Christmas. The camera shop owner introduced him to Smith's work, and then Sam discovered Smith's archives at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona: "Two eighteen-wheel trucks delivered 44,000 pounds of his things there when he died in 1978, at fifty-nine, according to his doctors of “everything” (cirrhosis, diabetes, high blood pressure, an enlarged heart). There are hundreds of 10,000 word letters to friends as well as people he barely knew, 25,000 vinyl records, as many as a million negatives and contact sheets, thousands of 3x5 cards filled with chicken-scratch notes to himself, along with brilliant fragments from the unfinished Pittsburgh project and 1,600 reels of tape from his Manhattan loft—two bodies of work that have kept me busy for ten years. His work has become my work."
Read the rest of Sam's piece about Smith's archives, from APS 3.
Posted on November 17, 2009 |
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