GME News
Recently, Raimondo Borea’s iconic photograph of educator Kenneth B. Clark has been placed on permanent display as part of a wall text at the entry to the Kenneth B. Clark Auditorium at the New York State Museum in Albany.
Read MoreHugh Bell was of St. Lucian ancestry, and quite a number of his photographs focused on his Afro-Caribbean roots.
Read MoreHugh Bell (1927-2012) was born in New York to parents who emigrated from the Caribbean island of St. Lucia. He spent a lot of time doing the thing he liked best, photographing jazz musicians, through which he gained notoriety while in his twenties. Hugh Bell also focused on documenting Gay Pride, Wigstock, and the Greenwich Village Halloween parade during the 1980s and 1990s.
Read MoreRaimondo Borea’s 1979 portrait of author, activist and notable public intellectual James Baldwin.
Read MoreRaimondo Borea’s arresting, untitled photo of a woman in the Subway, and other photos from his distinctive NYC photo essays, have been presented on the Today Show by Hugh Downs.
Read MoreHugh Bell was a renowned art and commercial photographer, who worked in New York City over the course of his entire professional career.
Read MoreHugh Bell (1927-2012) spent a lot of time doing the thing he liked best, photographing jazz musicians. After graduating from NYU in 1952 with a bachelor's degree in Journalism and Cinematic Art, Bell’s iconic photo “Hot Jazz” was selected by Edward Steichen for inclusion in The Museum of Modern Art's landmark exhibition, The Family of Man, one of the most successful photographic exhibitions of all time.
Read MoreThe American Photography Archives Group visited The Museum of the City of New York to take a tour of the archive holdings and listen to a talk by Sean Corcoran, the Curator of Prints and Photographs. GME is an active member of APAG as a representative of photographers Hugh Bell and Raimondo Borea.
A photograph of Raimondo Borea's has been used in the recently published book "Acting in the Academy: The History of Professional Actor Training in US Higher Education," by Peter Zazzali. The picture of Borea's depicts the first graduating class from the Juilliard School's acting program taught by John Houseman and was attended by Kevin Kline (below).
Group 1 of the juilliard school's acting program (c. 1972)
Summary of the Book:
"There are over 150 BFA and MFA acting programs in the US today, nearly all of which claim to prepare students for theatre careers. Peter Zazzali contends that the curricula of these courses represent an ethos that is as outdated as it is limited, given today’s shrinking job market for stage actors.
Acting in the Academy traces the history of actor training in universities to make the case for a move beyond standard courses in voice and speech, movement, or performance, to develop an entrepreneurial model that motivates and encourages students to create their own employment opportunities. This book answers questions such as:
How has the League of Professional Theatre Training Programs shaped actor training in the US?
How have training programmes and the acting profession developed in relation to one another
What impact have these developments had on American acting as an art form?
Acting in the Academy calls for a reconceptualization of actor training the US, and looks to newly empower students of performance with a fresh, original perspective on their professional development."
Hugh Bell was a renowned art and commercial photographer, who worked in New York City over the course of his entire professional career. Upon his death in 2012, his son-in-law, Richard Martha, was named Executor of the Estate of Hugh Bell. In 2014 GME was engaged on an exclusive basis by the Bell Estate to manage the collection of Hugh Bell’s photographs and to further the artist’s legacy. GME is committed to resurrecting the career of this overlooked photographer, through licensing of his photographs, republishing his out-of-print books, mounting curated exhibitions, and in identifying a long-term repository for this significant collection of photographic works. Please contact info@gartenbergmedia.com for all inquiries related to the Hugh Bell photography collection.
Hot Jazz (1952)
Self portrait
Hugh Cecil Bell was born in 1927 in Harlem, New York City to parents from the Caribbean island of St. Lucia. As a young man he first attended City College, and then graduated in 1952 with a degree in Journalism and Cinematic Art from NYU. After NYU, Bell put his Film Degree to use and found work as a cameraman for television commercials.
Early in his career, Bell was befriended by the cinema vérité pioneer, Richard Leacock, who was interested in helping minorities find a professional footing. Bell assisted Leacock on the shooting of several documentaries, including “Jazz Dance” (1952). He also accompanied Leacock on several trips to Spain, where Bell met and photographed the world-famous Spanish bullfighter, Dominguin, as well as Lauren Bacall and Ernest Hemingway. Bell’s friendship with Leacock continued to deepen, and over the ensuing decades, he photographed the Leacock family in an extended series of candid portraits at their home.
In 1952, Bell shot his first of many legendary photographs of jazz greats, “Hot Jazz”. In 1955, Edward Steichen selected “Hot Jazz” for the groundbreaking exhibition “The Family of Man” at The Museum of Modern Art. Over 2 million photos were submitted and only 503 were selected. The exhibit showcased work from 273 photographers including Dorothea Lange, Edward Weston and Irving Penn. This was the first instance of Hugh Bell’s photographic work being shown alongside these towering figures of modern photography.
During the 1950’s, Hugh Bell frequented all the top jazz clubs in New York City such as the Village Gate, the Open Door Café and Circle in the Square. He encountered and photographed many legendary musicians, including Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Sarah Vaughan. Bell’s lifelong passion for taking jazz photographs, often referred to as his “Jazz Giants” series, has been published in books and magazines. His jazz photographs have also graced the covers of innumerable vinyl jazz records.
In addition to jazz clubs, Bell went to and photographed local boxing matches, dance performances and legitimate plays, including Jean Genet’s “The Blacks,” a seminal theatrical production starring James Earl Jones, Roscoe Lee Brown, Cicely Tyson, Maya Angelou, and Godfrey Cambridge, that was mounted at the St. Mark’s Playhouse in 1961.
Bell opened his own studio in Manhattan in the 1960’s. Over the course of the ensuing decades he worked as a commercial photographer creating photographs for print advertisements, many of which were targeted specifically to the African American community.
Interspersed with his commercial work, Bell also focused on portraiture. During this period, he is most known for his images of the female figure. In 1970, a series of these portraits were published in Avant Garde magazine in a feature entitled, “Bell’s Belles”. Throughout this period, he also traveled to the West Indies, focusing on the region of his geographical heritage. He photographed carnivals in Trinidad and Haiti, and daily life in Antigua. He also traveled to Brazil, where he took photographs of the local citizenry.
Hugh Bell passed away on October 31, 2012. He left behind an extensive and wide-ranging photographic legacy that is now ready for rediscovery.
◊
For more information about the Hugh Bell archive and his photographs, please contact:
info@gartenbergmedia.com
All Photographs, © The Estate of Hugh Bell
