He writes as he photographs - he's someone who's been there. From war-baby to unlikely jack-the-lad in Her Majesty's armed forces; from Soho to Moscow as an agency photographer, sometimes developing films in lavatory pans behind the Iron Curtain, sometimes doing a bunk down the back street of Rio; he is also one of the best portrait photographers of his generation.

Terry Cryer is without doubt a wild thing, from the days when press photography was dangerously ad-libbed. He went, he got the picture and then more often than not the adventure was in getting out. As Val Wilmer was the first to point out, he is the guy walking triumphantly away from the very gig you are trying to crash.

But as his wonderful series of jazz portraits reveal, he can also be invisible. Nobody can teach what he has learned about the human face. The amazing thing about his jazz photography is not its energy - all that jazz - but the eerie calm.

For example, in the New Grove Dictionary of Jazz (1991 edition) there is a repro publicity shot of the saxophonist Sonny Stitt. He grins, he holds his horn on his lap, he looks straight into the lens. However, to know who Sonny Stitt was, to himself and others, you have to see Terry Cryer's woundingly honest portrait.

Terry Cryer's photography was always, in the first instance, the product of a working stiff. Like the very best, he did what he did for money and to put food on the table. The respect he got was from others in the same business.

Slowly, over the last ten years or so, his work has begun to be exhibited as art. Wherever it has been shown it has won the sort of astonished praise the English reserve for things that have always been there under their own noses.

Persuading Terry Cryer that he's an artist is always going to be an argument settled with a glass in the hand. The man's a maverick. The work speaks eloquently and movingly for itself. --Brian Thompson

Visit Terry's web site at http://www.terrycryer.com

All photos copyright © Terry Cryer. All Rights Reserved.

Johnny Hodges, 1958, Royal Festival Hall, London.

Paul Gonsalves , 1957, Flamingo Jazz Club, Wardour Street, London.

Coleman Hawkins & Sonny Stitt, 1959, Bradford, England.

Frank Wess, 1957, London.

Count Basie, 1959, Royal Festival Hall, London.

Freddy Green, 1959, Royal Festival Hall, London.

Louis Armstrong & Trummy Young, 1956, Manchester, England.

Muddy Waters, 1958, Conway Hall, London.

Nat King Cole, 1960, London Palladium.

Joe Newman, 1957, Royal Festival Hall, London.

Lee Konitz, 1957, Gaumont State, Kilburn, London.

Big Bill Broonzy, 1957, Manchester, England.