W. Eugene Smith : The Jazz Loft Project

In January 1955 W. Eugene Smith, a celebrated photographer at Life magazine whose quarrels with his editors were legendary, quit his longtime well-paying job at the magazine. He was thirty-six. He was ambitious, quixotic, in search of greater freedom and artistic license. He turned his attention to a freelance assignment in Pittsburgh, a three-week job that turned into a four-year obsession and in the end, remained unfinished. In a letter to Ansel Adams, Smith described it as a “debacle” and an “embarrassment.”

In 1957, Smith moved out of the home he shared with his wife and four children in Croton-on-Hudson, New York and moved into a dilapidated, five-story loft building at 821 Sixth Avenue in New York City’s wholesale flower district. 821 Sixth Avenue (between Twenty-eighth and Twenty-ninth streets) 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 the epic Pittsburgh project, 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.
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The Jazz Loft Project, organized by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University in cooperation with the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona and the W. Eugene Smith estate, is devoted to preserving and cataloging Smith’s tapes, researching the photographs, and obtaining oral history interviews with all surviving loft participants. The transferred recordings reveal high sound quality and extraordinary musical and cultural content, offering unusual documentation of an after-hours New York jazz scene.”

NPR's Weekend Edition this past weekend wrapped up their 10 part The Jazz Loft : Radio Series which y'all can now hear the full series available online now.

The Jazz Loft Project was started with Sam Stephenson of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University spent seven years going through W. Eugene Smith's roughly 40,000 image and about 4,000 hours of tape (Smith wired the building) to cataloging, archiving, selecting, and editing together into a book called "The Jazz Loft Project"

Listening to the podcast is just fascinating so if you got some time this holiday season, check them out.

Oh, you can Friend them on Facebook too. Exhibition will start in New York at the New York Public Library for the Performance Arts in Feb 2010 and will continue to Chicago Cultural Center, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University and the Center for Creative Photography at the Univeristy of Arizona. Fingers crossed on a West Coast showing :)