Over the two decades Lauren Deutsch has been photographing jazz musicians, she’s found that often her best pictures aren’t necessarily the sharpest or the most rigorously composed. She likes the ones that evoke the spirit of the music–sometimes through the demeanor of the musician and sometimes through the texture of the image.
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Deutsch, who’s executive director of the Jazz Institute of Chicago, says Harlem photographer Roy De Carava is her hero. “He showed me how to work with what’s available in a given situation.” She never uses a flash; instead, to photograph in dark, smoky bars she experiments with slow shutter speeds and sometimes moves the camera as she shoots.
“You take what is given to you,” Deutsch says, “and learn how to work with it, which is what improvisers do when they’re playing.”
