The Jazz Loft Project - Photographs and Tapes of W Eugene Smith From 821 Sixth Avenue 1957-1965

Alfred A Knopf, New York, 2009. Small (5mm) tear to front cover next to spine, otherwise good secondhand condition.

In 1957, Eugene Smith, a thirty-eight-year-old magazine photographer, walked out of his comfortable settled world?his longtime well-paying job at Life and the home he shared with his wife and four children in Croton-on-Hudson, New York?to move into a dilapidated, five-story loft building at 821 Sixth Avenue (between Twenty-eighth and Twenty-ninth streets) in New York City?s wholesale flower district. Smith was trying to complete the most ambitious project of his life, a massive photo-essay on the city of Pittsburgh.821 Sixth Avenue was a late-night haunt of musicians, including some of the biggest names in jazz?Charles Mingus, Zoot Sims, Bill Evans, and Thelonious Monk among them?and countless fascinating, underground characters. As his ambitions broke down for his quixotic Pittsburgh opus, Smith found solace in the chaotic, somnambulistic world of the loft and its artists. He turned his documentary impulses away from Pittsburgh and toward his offbeat new surroundings. From 1957 to 1965, Smith exposed 1,447 rolls of film at his loft, making roughly 40,000 pictures, the largest body of work in his career, photographing the nocturnal jazz scene as well as life on the streets of the flower district, as seen from his fourth-floor window. He wired the building like a surreptitious recording studio and made 1,740 reels (4,000 hours) of stereo and mono audiotapes, capturing more than 300 musicians.