Traveling Exhibits Overview

Oh Freedom Over Me

Jazz Loft Project

Nuestras Historias, Nuestros Sueños / Our Stories, Our Dreams






“See, actually I’m doing a book about this building itself . . . out the window and within the building, because it’s quite a weird, interesting story.”
—W. Eugene Smith, recorded on tape at the loft, circa 1960

What Is the Jazz Loft Project?

In 1957 W. Eugene Smith, a celebrated former Life magazine photographer, walked 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 (between Twenty-eighth and Twenty-ninth Streets) in New York City’s wholesale flower district. 821 Sixth Avenue 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 underground characters.

From 1957 to 1965 Smith exposed 1,447 rolls of film at the loft, making roughly 40,000 pictures, the largest body of work in his career. He photographed the nocturnal jazz scene as well as life on the streets as seen from his fourth-floor window. He also wired the building, creating a surreptitious recording studio, and made 1,740 reels (4,000 hours) of stereo and mono audiotapes, capturing more than three hundred musicians and a fascinating array of radio and TV programs that enhance the odd and poignant kaleidoscope of time and place framed by the four walls of 821 Sixth Avenue.

The Jazz Loft Project exhibition is the first-ever public presentation of Smith's vintage prints and audio recordings. The project, based at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, also includes oral history interviews with hundreds of participants in the original loft scene. A book authored by project director Sam Stephenson and published by Alfred A. Knopf accompanies this exhibition, as does an ambitious public radio series produced by WNYC and the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.

The exhibition—curated by Sam Stephenson and Courtney Reid-Eaton, exhibitions director at the Center for Documentary Studies, with Jazz Loft Project research associate Dan Partridge and program coordinator Lauren Hart—includes over two hundred images and several hours of audio.

The Jazz Loft Project will be on display from February 17, 2010, to May 22, 2010, in the Donald and Mary Oenslager Gallery at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts located at 40 Lincoln Center Plaza. The exhibition will travel to the Chicago Cultural Center, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, the Museum of Photographic Arts and the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, among other venues.

The exhibition was organized by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, in association with the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona. The Jazz Loft Project at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University was made possible through the generous support of the Reva and David Logan Foundation, with significant additional support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, and the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (The Grammy Foundation), the Duke University Office of the Provost, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, Ken and Amelia Jacob, and Klimpton Hotels.


To learn more about the Jazz Loft Project, visit www.jazzloftproject.org









banner image:

Partial view of the Lyndhurst Gallery, one of four exhibition spaces at CDS. Photograph by Christopher Sims.


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