Duke Ellington, Paris (1958) 
Herman Leonard's fascination with the camera began at age eleven, when he discovered his older brother's beautiful art studies. Herman then began photographing his schoolmates, and his instant success led him to pursue this as his career. In 1940, Herman enrolled at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, the only university offering a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in photography. He was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1942 and spent two and a half years trekking through Burma from northern Assam to Mandalay. Finally, Herman returned to finish his degree at Ohio University in 1947. At that time, Herman's idol was the famed portraitist Yousuf Karsh who lived in Canada. When he interviewed with Karsh for an assistant's job he was unsuccessful. However, Herman was offered a nonpaying-one year internship. This position became a turning point in Herman's professional career, as he traveled with Karsh, assisting in photographing great personalities of the era including Albert Einstein, President Harry Truman, Martha Graham and Clark Gabel. Shortly thereafter, Herman moved to New York and opened his first studio in Greenwich Village, photographing aspiring actors, singers and dancers, while also completing assignments for Life, Esquire, Look, Cosmopolitan, Playboy and many others. Herman's passion for jazz brought him to the swinging night clubs of Broadway, 52nd Street and Harlem. The camera allowed him free access to the clubs and its musicians. He made his jazz work a personal project, free from editorial or commercial concerns. The lighting technique he developed was a result of many hours spent backstage in clubs and theaters, where the lights were low and the smoke was thick. In 1956, Marlon Brando selected Herman as his personal photographer for a research trip to the Far East. Returning to the U.S. through Paris, Herman was offered the position of Chief Photographer for Barclay Records. He also became Playboy's European correspondent, while branching out into fashion and advertising photography. In 1980 Herman moved his family to the island of Ibiza, off the coast of Spain, where he lived the life of a county squire in a three hundred year old country farm house. In 1987 he moved to England. It was here that he finally pulled out the cardboard box from under his bed which contained the jazz photographs and put together his first solo exhibition, Images of Jazz. Since this time, over 65 exhibitions of Herman's work have been held worldwide. In 1985, Editions Filipacchi in Paris produced Herman's first photographic collection in book form entitled The Eye of Jazz, which is now in its sixth printing by Viking. A new book, Jazz Memories was published in 1996 by the same company. The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. holds the entire Images of Jazz series in their permanent archive in the American Musical History Department. Recently, Herman received Ohio University's highest alumni award, the Medal of Merit for Achievement in Photography and an honorary Masters Degree in the Science of Photography from the Brooks Institute of California.
