Artist Herb Snitzer

The Jazz Legends Portfolio

When I discovered New York’s jazz clubs, I was again in a new world in many ways.

First, I had to change to a fast film that would increase sensitivity to the low lights of the club interiors. I experimented with underexposure and overdeveloping to see whether I preferred a grainy textural image or not. Second, it was an exhilarating challenge to capture the personalities of artists like Louis Armstrong, Lester Young, or Duke Ellington.

It was a thrill and an honor to be close enough physically and personally to capture such jazz greats on camera. Jazz, in its own way, changed my life. It pulls you awake. You are at the same time a participant and an observer. In retrospect, I see that my jazz photographs played an intrinsic role in the struggle for freedom, and they have been exhibited many, many times.  –  Herb Snitzer

The New York Portfolio

Herb Snitzer first moved to New York City in June of 1957 the day after his graduation from The Philadelphia College of Art to further pursuit the arts.

For him, New York City contained everything he had yearned for: a fantastic and ever changing performing and visual arts scene, vibrant and colorful street life, and a unique pulsing heartbeat that was impossible to resist.

This portfolio is just a fraction of the work Herb produced in New York, but reflects the people, sights and personality of the city that never sleeps, from the perspective of a young Herb Snitzer exploring the city through the eye of his camera during the late 1950’s and early 1960’s.

Artist Statement

To look at life in ways which reveal new realities is the quest of any serious artist; new ways of looking and thinking about one’s relationship to oneself and to the larger world on which all of us fleetingly reside.

Art has the capacity to transform and transcend that which is pedestrian and commonplace, giving the viewer (in the case of visual art) the opportunity to see and think about why the artist has produced the work in the first place.

The creative process is not separate from an artist’s total being…or so I believe. I know the history of art doesn’t always support this attitude, but I am convinced that one’s art and one’s life are intertwined, each reflecting the other.

My search began a long time ago when I moved to New York City, determined to be part of the nerve of my generation. I was determined to find my way in the small world of photography. There were no photographic galleries then; we exhibited our work on the walls of coffeehouses. We met at small cafes in Greenwich Village, and talked about art, music, literature, dance and theatre. New York City in the mid-to-late fifties was bursting with creative and highly original people.

I was part of that early movement of photographers who roamed the streets, day and night, looking for ways to express what we wanted to say about the chaos of the world in mid-20th Century. For me it was about meeting such photographic luminaries as W. Eugene Smith, Gordon parks, Cornell Capa and the great Edward Steichen, director of photography at The Museum of Modern Art. Each in their own way contributed to my early development as a photographer.

But it was my meeting Aaron Siskind that helped turn me inward, toward the creation of images that transcended time and place. His many years of friendship and support helped me immensely, so that I could easily move between what was “inside” and what was “outside.”

I lived and worked in New York City for seven tightly packed and charged years. I had opportunities to find myself in situations that heretofore I had only dreamed about.

Photographing Louis Armstrong while traveling with him and his great sextet of dedicated musicians was a singular thrill, still remembered with fondness these 45 years later. He was very kind to this then 27 year old photographer, on one of my early assignments for METRONOME magazine.

Meeting Tennessee Williams and Bette Davis when on assignment for The New York TIMES Sunday Magazine (in rehearsal for Williams’ play, The Night of The Iguana), provided me with ample time to make a series of portraits of Williams and Davis that still “hold.”

My work has remained inner directed these past fifteen years, yet I continue to look outward to see the injustices and inequalities that surround me. I have tried, in my own measured way, to visually comment on what I see and believe about the world(s) within which I live.

I am now in the early winter of my life, alive and still curious about this ever-changing and dynamic world – a world filled with too much pain. Early on I said that art transforms and transcends. I deeply believe this. The creative process enhances and ennobles life, changing forever how one sees the world.

HERB SNITZER 
4/27/05 
St. Petersburg, Florida

 Herb Snitzer’s Website