DeCordova Collects Photographs: Recent Acquisitions
Herb Snitzer
Herb Snitzer’s career has included work as a photographer, educator, and magazine and corporate journalist. Snitzer has been a free-lance photographer for Life, Look and other magazines and associate editor of Metronome, a leading jazz magazine. He is the author of five books, with subjects ranging from education, to music, to interracial family life. Throughout his career he has met and photographed many of the jazz greats, and jazz has been a central metaphor in his creative process. The photographs in this exhibition have been selected from the portfolio Such Sweet Thunder, ten images of jazz performers published in collaboration with Palm Press, Inc. of Concord, MA. While some of the jazz photographs show the performer at work, many focus on the performer at rest in a moment of contemplation or relaxation. Snitzer often closes in on his subject, focusing on the artist’s eyes, hands or instrument, so that we become aware of the performer as a human being whose emotional state ranges from exhaustion, to joy, to deep concentration. The photographs of Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis are particularly striking—Armstrong’s “tired, human face” is seen on the bus while touring, and Davis’s “harrowing, almost haunted look” reflects “the beginning stages of the illness that eventually killed.”
