Jazz Photographer Herman Leonard Regroups at 86

The home of Herman Leonard is adorned with the rich decor of a man who has seen the world. Hanging on the wall are woven temple offerings from Bali and votive clay tablets from Burma. On a shelf is a damaged metal Buddha he rescued from a fire while stationed in Southeast Asia during World War II. An ancient American sign nearby reads: “Colored Only. No Whites Allowed."

Just as prominent are artifacts from his love of jazz music, rows of books and CDs and, most preciously, the stacks of elegant photographs he's taken of musicians since 1948. Leonard is 86 now, and he happily opens up his portfolio to flip through decades of defining images of Duke Ellington, Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday and Miles Davis, vivid and alive in frames filled with smoky, shimmering light.

“I took advantage of being a photographer to get myself into the clubs, so I could sit in front of Charlie Parker," he says with a chuckle, explaining his inspiration as a young photographer in New York. “I got to listen to music in person. That enriched me. The money didn't. And I tried to make images that would satisfy me."

The market for jazz pictures was modest, just Downbeat and Metronome magazines in the U.S. But he kept turning up at the clubs with his big 4x5 Speed Graphic camera and two battery-powered strobe lights, aiming to capture the ambience of a jazz club. What he documented from his earliest days have remained among the most lasting images of musicians from the last half-century and more: Ellington counting off a beat in silhouette at the piano; a young Tony Bennett embracing a microphone; a pensive Chet Baker reflected in a mirror, years before drugs hardened his features. The pictures are naturalistic and dramatically composed, full of evocative light and shadow.

These are some of the photographs included in “Legends of Jazz Photography," an exhibition opening Thursday at the Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los Angeles. Leonard's pictures will hang alongside enduring jazz photographs by the late William Claxton and William Gottlieb. Opening in an adjacent room is a previously scheduled collection of color pictures by rock, jazz and soul photographer Jim Marshall, 74, who died Wednesday. “Herman has lived a full life, and Jim was the same way. They didn't do anything 50%," says gallery co-owner David Fahey.

For Leonard, the exhibition is another step in his mission to rebuild his work and legacy in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which flooded his home in New Orleans in 2005, destroying 8,000 prints, a lifetime of work and everything he'd planned on leaving for his children. Fortunately, his 60,000 negatives were safely transported before the storm to the vault of the Ogden Museum.