jazz loft project exhibition
New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center
On view through May 22, 2010
The exhibition, organized by the Center for Documentary Studies as part of a multiyear project, features never-before-displayed vintage black-and-white prints and rarely heard audio recordings by photographer W. Eugene Smith, who spent eight years documenting the jazz musicians, artists, and underground characters who inhabited the scene at 821 Sixth Avenue in New York City from 1957 to 1965. In the loft, Smith exposed more than 1,400 rolls of film, making roughly 40,000 pictures, the largest body of work in his career. He also wired the building like a recording studio and made 4,000 hours of tapes, capturing more than 300 musicians.