Sight Readings

Alan John Ainsworth studies the photographers who documented jazz in the United States, from around 1900 through the Jazz Age and into the 1960s. He looks at jazz as a subject for the camera, asks what drew different kinds of photographers to it, and considers the reasons behind the choices they made when framing their images. The study rests on extensive archival research.

While some of the photographers are well known today, Ainsworth also brings forward figures who have received less attention. These include African American photojournalists, studio portrait makers, early twentieth-century émigrés, and Jewish exiles who arrived in the 1930s. Their work has often been overlooked, and the book gives it a closer reading.

The book draws on ideas from contemporary photographic theory and opens with a foreword by Darius Brubeck. It covers twentieth-century jazz photography and the people who made it.