William Paul Gottlieb (January 28, 1917 – April 23, 2006) was an American photographer and newspaper columnist who is best known for his classic photographs of the leading performers of the Golden Age of American jazz in the 1930s and 1940s. Gottlieb's photographs are among the best known and widely reproduced images of this era of jazz.
Gottlieb made portraits of hundreds of prominent jazz musicians and personalities, typically while they were playing or singing at well-known New York City jazz clubs. Gottlieb's subjects included
Louis Armstrong
Louis Daniel Armstrong (August 4, 1901 – July 6, 1971), nicknamed "Satchmo", "Satch", and "Pops", was an American trumpeter and Singing, vocalist. He was among the most influential figures in jazz. His career spanned five decades and se ...
Charlie Parker
Charles Parker Jr. (August 29, 1920 – March 12, 1955), nicknamed "Bird" or "Yardbird", was an American jazz saxophonist, band leader and composer. Parker was a highly influential soloist and leading figure in the development of bebop, a form ...
,
Billie Holiday
Billie Holiday (born Eleanora Fagan; April 7, 1915 – July 17, 1959) was an American jazz and swing music singer. Nicknamed "Lady Day" by her friend and music partner, Lester Young, Holiday had an innovative influence on jazz music and pop si ...
Jo Stafford
Jo Elizabeth Stafford (November 12, 1917July 16, 2008) was an American traditional pop music singer, whose career spanned five decades from the late 1930s to the early 1980s. Admired for the purity of her voice, she originally underwent classi ...
,
Thelonious Monk
Thelonious Sphere Monk (, October 10, 1917 – February 17, 1982) was an American jazz pianist and composer. He had a unique improvisational style and made numerous contributions to the standard jazz repertoire, including " 'Round Midnight", ...
,
Stan Kenton
Stanley Newcomb Kenton (December 15, 1911 – August 25, 1979) was an American popular music and jazz artist. As a pianist, composer, arranger and band leader, he led an innovative and influential jazz orchestra for almost four decades. Thoug ...
,
Ray McKinley
Ray McKinley (June 18, 1910 – May 7, 1995) was an American jazz drummer, singer, and bandleader. He played drums and later led the Major Glenn Miller Army Air Forces Orchestra in Europe. He also led the new Glenn Miller Orchestra in 1956.
...
,
Benny Goodman
Benjamin David Goodman (May 30, 1909 – June 13, 1986) was an American clarinetist and bandleader known as the "King of Swing".
From 1936 until the mid-1940s, Goodman led one of the most popular swing big bands in the United States. His co ...
,
Coleman Hawkins
Coleman Randolph Hawkins (November 21, 1904 – May 19, 1969), nicknamed "Hawk" and sometimes "Bean", was an American jazz tenor saxophonist.Yanow, Scot"Coleman Hawkins: Artist Biography" AllMusic. Retrieved December 27, 2013. One of the first p ...
Toots Thielemans
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, and
Benny Carter
Bennett Lester Carter (August 8, 1907 – July 12, 2003) was an American jazz saxophonist, clarinetist, trumpeter, composer, arranger, and bandleader. With Johnny Hodges, he was a pioneer on the alto saxophone. From the beginning of his career ...
. In accord with his wishes, Gottlieb's photographs were placed in the public domain; many are used in Wikipedia and other public domain or freely licensed venues.
Biography
Gottlieb was born on January 28, 1917, in the Canarsie neighborhood of Brooklyn, and grew up in
Bound Brook, New Jersey
Bound Brook is a borough in Somerset County, New Jersey, United States, located along the Raritan River. At the 2010 United States Census, the borough's population was 10,402,Lehigh University in 1938 with a degree in economics. While at Lehigh, Gottlieb wrote for the weekly campus newspaper and became editor-in-chief of ''The Lehigh Review''. In his last year of college, he began writing a weekly jazz column for '' The Washington Post''. While writing for the ''Post'', Gottlieb taught economics at the University of Maryland. After the ''Post'' determined that it would not pay a photographer to accompany Gottlieb's visits to jazz clubs, Gottlieb borrowed a press camera and began taking pictures for his column.
Gottlieb was drafted into the Army Air Corps in 1943, and served as a photography and a classifications officer. After World War II, Gottlieb moved to New York City to pursue a career in journalism. He worked as a writer-photographer for '' Down Beat'' magazine, and his work also appeared frequently in ''Record Changer'', the '' Saturday Review'', and ''
Collier's
''Collier's'' was an American general interest magazine founded in 1888 by Peter Fenelon Collier. It was launched as ''Collier's Once a Week'', then renamed in 1895 as ''Collier's Weekly: An Illustrated Journal'', shortened in 1905 to ''Collie ...
''. In 1948, Gottlieb retired from jazz journalism in order to spend more time with his wife, Delia, and children.
After Gottlieb left ''Down Beat'', he began working at Curriculum Films, an educational filmstrip company. He founded his own filmstrip company, which was later bought by
McGraw Hill
McGraw Hill is an American educational publishing company and one of the "big three" educational publishers that publishes educational content, software, and services for pre-K through postgraduate education. The company also publishes referen ...
. Many of his filmstrips won awards from the Canadian Film Board and the Educational Film Librarians Association. Gottlieb also wrote and illustrated children's books, including several Golden Books such as ''The Four Seasons'', ''Tigers Adventure'', and ''Laddie the Superdog''. He also wrote educational books such as ''Science Facts You Won't Believe'' and ''Space Flight''.
Apart from his photography career, Gottlieb also played amateur tennis. Gottlieb and his son Steven were often ranked the number one father-and-son ream on the East Coast, and were twice ranked among the top ten teams in the US.
Gottlieb married the former Delia Potofsky, daughter of
Jacob Potofsky
Jacob Samuel Potofsky (November 26, 1894 – August 5, 1979) was a Russian Empire-born American trade unionist, best known as second president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, succeeding founder Sidney Hillman.
Background
Jacob S ...