From 1957 to 1965, photographer W. Eugene Smith lived in loft space at 821 Sixth Avenue in Manhattan. Smith had already established himself as a pioneer of the magazine photo essay—a collection of images that told a compelling story. Smith's photo essays appeared most often in Life. Before the rise of the documentary in the early 1960s, with the advent of the portable shoulder camera, Smith's photo montages served the same purpose. [Photo above of W. Eugene Smith, courtesy of DOCNYC.net/The University of Arizona. © The Heirs of W. Eugene Smith]
By 1957, Smith had left his wife and four children in suburban New York and moved into a loft on the fourth floor. Also in the building were painter and jazz lover David X. Young, jazz trumpeter Dick Cary and jazz composer-pianist Hall Overton. In the loft, Smith obsessively took photos and recorded jazz musicians rehearsing, jamming and conversing as well as ambient loft and street noise.
The musicians included Thelonious Monk, Zoot Sims, Bill Crow, Jim Hall, Jimmy Giuffre, Bob Brookmeyer, Carla Bley, Steve Swallow and Rahsaan Roland Kirk, to name just a few. In all, Smith amassed 1,740 reel-to-reel tapes and nearly 40,000 photographs of musicians and street scenes shot from the loft window. [Photo above of Thelonious Monk at the loft, by W. Eugene Smith]
In 2009, Knopf published writer Sam Stephenson's book, The Jazz Loft Project. Next came a 2015 documentary called The Jazz Loft According to W. Eugene Smith, directed by Sara Fishko.
Here's the documentary:
