Jazz photographer got start at OU

by Brynn Burton
Staff Writer

It's the late 1940s in a dark and smoky nightclub on 52nd Street in New York City. The soft, mellow sound of a saxophone hangs in the background as the audience listens with their eyes closed. Ohio University alumnus Herman Leonard captured this famous scene more than 60 years ago.

Leonard attended OU in the 1940s and studied photography.

"OU was the only school in the country that offered a degree in photography," Leonard said

He finished two years at OU before he was drafted for World War II. He came back in 1945 and graduated in 1947.

He started taking pictures when he was a kid in the 1930s growing up in Allentown, Pa., near Philadelphia. But after high school, Leonard decided to pursue his talent at OU.

"The school (OU) was so small," Leonard said. "There were 3,000 to 4,000 students. It was a small pond where you could be a big fish. If I went there today, I'd be lost."

Leonard was involved with campus photography at OU, working for the Athena yearbook and for The Post.

"I was the photo editor for the Athena," Leonard said "I was also a photographer for The Post. Working for the paper really kept me busy. I covered all the dances and campus events."

Leonard said he remembers OU was very quiet when he attended and did not have the party school reputation it has today.

"I had a ball at school," he said. "The whole mentality of 18-to-20 year olds is much different today than it was for me."

While at OU, Leonard became friends with Chuck Stewart. Stewart, class of '49, was also a photography major and has made a name for himself in the industry.

Stewart worked with Leonard at his studio in New York and ran it when Leonard went to work as a photographer for Marlon Brando.

"We worked on the yearbook together," Stewart said. "We became fast friends. Herm became my mentor as well as my friend."

While at OU, Leonard took his first jazz photos - the kind of photography that made him famous. Benny Goodman was the first musician Leonard photographed at OU.

"That night there was a lighting problem on stage, so the picture I took of him was a backlight photograph," he said. "That picture and the style I took it in inspired me to take more like that."

After graduation, Leonard opened a studio in Greenwich Village in New York City and began shooting portraits for magazines such as Life, Look, Esquire, Playboy and Cosmopolitan.

Leonard photographed many well-known musicians, including Tony Bennett, Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie and Billie Holiday.

In a PBS documentary about Leonard, narrated by his friend Tony Bennett, Bennett called Leonard, "The greatest living photographer of jazz musicians."

The Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. honored Leonard by placing his entire collection in the permanent archives of musical history.

President Clinton presented a portfolio of Leonard's prints as an official gift from the U.S. government to the King of Thailand, Bhumibol Adulyadej.

Leonard's son, David, who graduated from OU in 1999, remembers his father reminiscing about how much the school has changed since he left and his son became a student.

"My dad always talked about how he had an office in the park across from where the Front Room is now (the Howard Hall site)," David Leonard said. "He couldn't believe that the building was there when he was, and now, and when I was at school, it's a park."

Leonard lives in New Orleans. He published a personal photographic diary of his early career, Jazz Memories.