Description: "Originally published by Alfred A. Knopf, 2009, with the participation of the Collection and W. Eugene Smith Archive at the Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona."
Brief description:
Sam Stephenson is a writer from North Carolina now based in College Station, TX. He is the author of a biography of Smith, Gene Smith's Sink, as well as Dream Street: W. Eugene Smith's Pittsburgh Project and The Jazz Loft Project: The Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith from 821 Sixth Avenue. He is also the ghost writer of Don't Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You, a memoir by Lucinda Williams. In 2019, he won a Guggenheim Fellowship for his work in progress about the band Jane's Addiction.
Review Quotes: "There are many terrific photos in The Jazz Loft Project of musicians playing, chatting, or resting among Smith's archive. But these photos read quite differently from famous photos by such photographers as Carol Reiff, William Gottlieb, or William Claxton. They are stranger productions altogether--often fragmented, framing hands or feet alone, or featuring unplayed instruments with no musicians in sight. . . . Stephenson has undertaken a massive task, involving extensive archival and field research, as well as innumerable editorial decisions, and he has produced a stunning book that winds its argument less along the wire of discourse than across a complex web of images in juxtaposition. Unlike his gargantuan Pittsburgh project, this book is not something Smith imagined, or had in view. But Stephenson has done something Smith found very hard to do, and has done it, moreover, in a way that is true to Smith's extraordinary vision of the world."--Jonathan Elmer "American Literary History"