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      in Movies

      Eva Sereny, Who Photographed Film Stars at Work, Dies at 86

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      She captured De Niro, Streep, Eastwood and many others, often in unguarded moments. Working with directors like Fellini and Spielberg inspired her to make movies herself.In 1972, Eva Sereny was in Rome photographing rehearsals for “The Assassination of Trotsky,” starring Richard Burton as the Russian revolutionary, when his wife, Elizabeth Taylor, who was not in the movie, visited the set.One of Ms. Sereny’s shots captured a moment in the celebrated stars’ famously turbulent marriage, which would soon end: the two staring icily at each other, as if they were re-enacting the tensions between their characters in the 1966 film “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”“It was obvious something was going on,” she told The Guardian in 2018. “You could feel it — there was no great love between them. I don’t remember them even noticing the shot, which was taken at a distance from below. If it had been a close-up of their faces, it would have just been two people looking not very nicely at each other. The body language brings it all together.”“You could feel it — there was no great love between them,” Ms. Sereny said of her 1972 photograph of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor on the set of “The Assassination of Trotsky.”Eva Sereny/Iconic ImagesThe Taylor-Burton picture was one of many notable images in Ms. Sereny’s decades-long career as a photographer, principally on hundreds of movie sets around the world. She took portraits, candid shots and publicity photos of stars like Marlon Brando, Meryl Streep, Vanessa Redgrave, Robert De Niro, Jacqueline Bisset, Clint Eastwood, Audrey Hepburn, Sean Connery and Harrison Ford.Ms. Sereny died on May 25 in a hospital near her home in London. She was 86.The cause was complications of a massive stroke, said Carrie Kania, the creative director of Iconic Images, which handles Ms. Sereny’s archive and, with ACC Art Books, published “Through Her Lens: The Stories Behind the Photography of Eva Sereny” in 2018.Ms. Sereny was on location for the first three Indiana Jones films and snapped a widely known portrait of Mr. Ford, who played Jones, and Mr. Connery, who played his father, on the set of “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” (1989). She was on the island of Mykonos for the filming of “The Greek Tycoon” in 1978 when she photographed Anthony Quinn dancing on the edge of the Aegean Sea.And on the set of Bernardo Bertolucci’s erotic drama “Last Tango in Paris” (1972), she overcame Brando’s distrust of photographers and took pictures of him laughing, lighting Mr. Bertolucci’s cigarette and talking to his co-star, Maria Schneider.Ms. Sereny was on the island of Mykonos for the filming of “The Greek Tycoon” in 1978 when she photographed Anthony Quinn dancing on the edge of the Aegean Sea.Eva Sereny/Iconic Images“There was something very considerate about the way he spoke to me,” she said in “Through Her Lens.” She recalled that she told him taking photos in unposed moments produced “the most interesting images,” and that “he sympathized with my take and said, ‘Well, look, all right.’”Eva Olga Martha Sereny was born in Zurich on May 19, 1935, to Hungarian-born parents. Her father, Richard, was a chemist; her mother, also named Eva, was an actress before they married.When her father traveled to England on business soon after the start of World War II, he was unable to return to Switzerland; Eva and her mother joined him in 1940. After the war, Mrs. Sereny opened a flower shop in the Burlington Arcade in London.Ms. Sereny was on location for the first three Indiana Jones films and snapped a widely known portrait of Harrison Ford and Sean Connery as father and son on the set of “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” (1989).Eva Sereny/Iconic ImagesEva’s photography career did not start until well after she moved to Italy when she was 20. There she married Vincio Delleani, an engineer, and had two sons, Riccardo and Alessandro. When her husband was in a car accident in 1966, she thought about a career.“I remember sitting beside him in the hospital thinking, ‘My God, but for a few seconds I would be a widow,’” she told The Guardian. “‘I’ve got to do something. I’m quite artistic, though I can’t draw. What about photography?’”Her husband set up a darkroom in the basement of their house, and she started working with his Rolleiflex camera. A friend of hers, who ran the Italian Olympic committee, asked her to take pictures of young athletes in training. She then took a chance and flew to London, where she pitched her work to The Times of London.Soon after she showed her photos of the athletes to the paper’s picture editor, The Times printed several of them.With help from a film publicist in Rome, Ms. Sereny spent two weeks on the set of Mike Nichols’s “Catch-22” (1970). It was the first of hundreds of movie set assignments, which would lead to the publication of her pictures in outlets like Elle, Paris Match, Marie Claire, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, Time and Newsweek over the next 34 years.One of her frequent subjects was Ms. Bisset, whom she photographed first during the filming of Francois Truffaut’s “Day for Night” (1973) and then on the sets of “The Deep” (1977), “Inchon” (1981) and “The Greek Tycoon.”Nick Nolte and Jacqueline Bisset on the set of “The Deep” (1977). “She could be argumentative,” Ms. Bisset said of Ms. Sereny, who photographed her on the set on four movies, “and she could make me laugh.”Eva Sereny/Iconic Images“She was refined in a very feminine way, and enjoyed her work,” Ms. Bisset said by phone. “When we started, she was bossy because I wasn’t doing what she wanted, but we became friends. She could be argumentative and she could make me laugh.“One day, she jolted me when she said, ‘Be sexy,’ and I’d say, ‘What do you mean?’ It was such an impossible command, and I’d ask, ‘What do you want me to do? Be more specific.’”Ms. Sereny’s work on movie sets enabled her to study the technique of directors like Nichols, Truffaut, Bertolucci, Federico Fellini (“Casanova”), Steven Spielberg (“Always” and the Indiana Jones films) and Werner Herzog (“Nosferatu the Vampyre”).In 1984 she directed a film of her own: “The Dress,” a 30-minute short starring Michael Palin, about a man who purchases a dress for his mistress. It won the BAFTA award — the British equivalent of the Oscar — for best short film. A decade later, she directed a feature, “Foreign Student,” about a French exchange student (Marco Hofschneider) at a Virginia university who falls in love with a young Black grammar-school teacher (Robin Givens) in racially sensitive 1956.Reviewing that film for The Chicago Tribune, John Petrakis called it “a deftly handled look at forbidden love that also finds time between kisses to examine cultural differences in this classic fish-out-of-water tale.”Frustrated with the limited opportunities for female directors, especially those who were not young, Ms. Sereny did not make any other films. She retired from photography in 2004.Ms. Sereny and Steven Spielberg in 1984.Eva Sereny/Iconic ImagesMs. Sereny is survived by her sons; her partner, Frank Charnock; and four grandchildren. Her husband died in 2007.In 1973, Ms. Sereny was on the set of “The Last of Sheila,” a murder mystery set on a yacht, and given approval by the director, Herbert Ross, to photograph the cast as it rehearsed. But the sound of her shutter annoyed one of the film’s stars, Raquel Welch, who angrily demanded that Ms. Sereny leave because she had not been informed of her presence.Years later, she was assigned again to photograph Ms. Welch.“I just hoped and prayed she wouldn’t recognize or remember me,” Ms. Sereny said in “Through the Lens.” “Just pretend it never happened!”“From the moment we met again,” she added, “everything was perfect.” More

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      in Music

      Chi Modu, Photographer Who Defined 1990s Hip-Hop, Dies at 54

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      His images of the Notorious B.I.G., Tupac Shakur, Dr. Dre and many more helped shape rap music’s visual identity.The Notorious B.I.G., stoic and resplendent in front of the twin towers. Tupac Shakur, eyes closed and arms in the air, tendrils of smoke wafting up from his lips. Eazy-E, perched atop his lowrider, using it as a throne. Mobb Deep, huddled with friends on the rooftop of a Queensbridge housing project. Nas, reflective in his childhood bedroom. Members of the Wu-Tang Clan, gathered in a circle and staring down at the camera, sharpness in their eyes.For the essential rap stars of the 1990s, odds are that their defining images — the ones imprinted for decades on the popular consciousness — were all taken by one person: Chi Modu.In the early and mid-1990s, working primarily for The Source magazine, at the time the definitive digest of hip-hop’s commercial and creative ascendance, Mr. Modu was the go-to photographer. An empathetic documentarian with a talent for capturing easeful moments in often extraordinary circumstances, he helped set the visual template for dozens of hip-hop stars. The Source was minting a new generation of superheroes, and Mr. Modu was capturing them as they took flight.Mr. Modu died on May 19 in Summit, N.J. He was 54. His wife, Sophia, said the cause was cancer.A portrait of Tupac Shakur taken by Mr. Modu in Atlanta in 1994. The two  had a special rapport, which spanned several years and photo shoots.Chi ModuWhen hip-hop was still gaining its footing in pop culture and the mainstream media hadn’t quite caught up, The Source stepped into that void. So did Mr. Modu, who was frequently the first professional photojournalist his subjects encountered.“My focus coming up,” Mr. Modu told BBC Africa in 2018, “was to make sure someone from the hip-hop community was the one responsible for documenting hip-hop artists.”His photos appeared on the cover of over 30 issues of the magazine. He also photographed the cover of Mobb Deep’s breakthrough 1995 album, “The Infamous…,” and “Doggystyle,” the 1993 debut album from Snoop Doggy Dogg (now Snoop Dogg), as well as Bad Boy Records’ “B.I.G. Mack” promotional campaign, which introduced the rappers the Notorious B.I.G. and Craig Mack.“We were pretty primitive in our look at that time, and we needed someone like him,” Jonathan Shecter, one of the founders of The Source, said.Mr. Modu’s personality, he added, was “super cool, no stress, no pressure. He’d just be a cool dude hanging out with the crew. A lot of rappers felt he was someone they could hang around with.”Mr. Modu’s signature approach was crisp and intimate — he rendered his subjects as heroes, but with an up-close humility. As that generation of emerging stars was learning how to present themselves visually, he helped refine their images. (He had a special rapport with Tupac Shakur, which spanned several years and shoots.)“When you bring that high level of skill to an arena that didn’t have a high level of skill, you can actually create really important work,” he told Pulse, a Nigerian publication, in 2018.For Mobb Deep’s album cover, he scheduled time in a photo studio, which yielded the indelibly ice-cold cover portrait of the duo. “A huge part of our success was that cover — he captured a vibe that encapsulated the album,” Mobb Deep’s Havoc said. “To see a young Black brother taking photos of that nature was inspiring.”But Mr. Modu also spent a day with the duo in Queensbridge, the neighborhood they hailed from, taking photos of them on the subway, by the Queensboro Bridge, on the roof of the housing project building Havoc lived in. “Twenty-five years later they feel almost more important,” Havoc said. “They give you a window into that time.”Mr. Modu in 2011 with his fellow hip-hop photographer Ricky Powell, who also died this year.Brian Ach/Getty ImagesIn addition to being a nimble photographer — sometimes he shot his images on slide film, with its low margin for error — Mr. Modu was a deft amateur psychologist. “He could flow from New York to Los Angeles and go into every ’hood. There was never a problem, never an issue,” Mr. Shecter said. His wife remembered Mr. Modu leaving a Jamaican vacation to photograph Mike Tyson, only to arrive and learn Mr. Tyson didn’t want to shoot; by the end of the day, via charm and cajoling, Mr. Modu had his shots.Mr. Modu was also a careful student of the dynamic balance between photographer and subject — the celebrity was the raison d’être for the shoot, but the photographer was the shaper of the image. “The reason I am able to take control is that I am here trying to help you go where you are trying to go,” Mr. Modu told Pulse. “I’m on your team. I’m the one looking at you. You may think you are cool but I have to see you as cool to press my shutter.”Jonathan Mannion, a friend of Mr. Modu’s and a hip-hop portraitist of the following generation, said Mr. Modu played a crucial role in establishing the presence of sophisticated photography in hip-hop. “He kicked a lot of doors off their hinges for us to walk through,” Mr. Mannion said.Christopher Chijioke Modu was born on July 7, 1966, in Arondizuogu, Nigeria, to Christopher and Clarice Modu. His father was a measurement statistician, and his mother worked in accounting and computer systems processing. His family emigrated to the United States in 1969, during the Biafran war.His parents later returned to Nigeria, but Mr. Modu stayed behind and graduated from the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey and received a bachelor’s degree in agribusiness economics from Rutgers University’s Cook College in 1989. He began taking photographs in college — using a camera bought for him as a birthday gift by Sophia Smith, whom he began dating in 1986 and would marry in 2008 — and received a certificate in photojournalism and documentary photography from the International Center of Photography in 1992.Getty ImagesHe shot for The Amsterdam News, the Harlem-based newspaper, and became a staff photographer at The Source in 1992 and later the magazine’s director of photography.After leaving The Source, he consulted on diversity initiatives for advertising and marketing companies and was a founder of a photo sharing website. And he continued to take photos around the world, capturing life in Yemen, Morocco, Cambodia, Sri Lanka and elsewhere.Is addition to his wife, Mr. Modu, who lived in Jersey City, is survived by his mother; three sisters, Ijeoma, Anaezi and Enechi; a brother, Emmanuel; and a son and daughter. In the early 2010s, Mr. Modu began efforts to reignite interest in his 1990s hip-hop photography, initially by partnering with a New York billboard company to display his work.“He felt there were certain gatekeepers, especially in the art world,” Ms. Modu said. “He always said the people are the ones that appreciate the art and want the art that he had. And with the billboard thing, he was taking the art to the people.”The billboard project, called “Uncategorized,” led to exhibitions in several cities around the world. In 2014 he had a solo show at the Pori Art Museum in Finland. In 2016 he released “Tupac Shakur: Uncategorized,” a book compiling photographs from multiple shoots with the rapper.Working in an era when the conditions of celebrity photo shoots were far less constrained than they are now, he retained the rights to his photographs. He sold posters and prints of his work, and licensed his photos for collaborations with apparel and action-sports companies. Last year, some of his photos were included in Sotheby’s first hip-hop auction.Years after his hip-hop picture-taking heyday, Mr. Modu still left an impression on his subjects. DJ Premier of Gang Starr — a duo Mr. Modu photographed for the cover of The Source in 1994 — recalled taking part in a European tour of hip-hop veterans in 2019. During a stop in Berlin, he heard from Mr. Modu, who was in town, and arranged backstage passes for him.When Mr. Modu arrived, he approached a room where the members of the Wu-Tang Clan were all gathered. DJ Premier recalled the rapturous reception: “As soon as he walked it in, it was almost like a cheer — ‘Chiiiiiiiiiiiiii!’” More

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      in Movies

      Film or Real Life?

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      THE TAKEFilm or Real Life?Jake Michaels for The New York TimesSometimes a place is more than just a place; it can be a scene. Even the blankest backdrops, like a parking lot or a sun-baked freeway, can shimmer with cinematic potential. Four photographers showed us the movie moments that they found all over.Jolie Ruben and Jake MichaelsWhen Jake Michaels began shooting around Los Angeles, he noticed how the backdrop and spontaneous action within the frame combine to tell a story, and how those moments dissolve quickly. “That’s why I think it’s interesting to go back to a place several times,” Michaels said. “You can see life kind of cycling. You see from a static point of view how much life exists in that frame.”Jake Michaels for The New York TimesJake Michaels for The New York TimesJake Michaels for The New York TimesJake Michaels for The New York TimesJake Michaels for The New York TimesJake Michaels for The New York TimesJake Michaels for The New York TimesJake Michaels for The New York TimesAn Rong XuAn Rong Xu, who made these photographs around Taiwan, is often influenced by the movies of 1990s Hong Kong and the Taiwanese cinematographer Mark Lee Ping-bing, who created images from “slow gestures that gather into something larger,” Xu said. In other words: Viewers sense a bigger story in the photo and are drawn in by that mystery.An Rong Xu for The New York TimesAn Rong Xu for The New York TimesAn Rong Xu for The New York TimesAn Rong Xu for The New York TimesAn Rong Xu for The New York TimesAn Rong Xu for The New York TimesAn Rong Xu for The New York TimesAn Rong Xu for The New York TimesSarah Van RijSarah van Rij made these pictures around Amsterdam and The Hague. Van Rij declared that filmmakers strongly influence her work — “maybe more than other photographers,” she said. Van Rij, who takes most of her shots outside on the streets, searches for a feeling before snapping the shutter, sometimes inventing her own private back story for a scene.Sarah van Rij for The New York TimesSarah van Rij for The New York TimesSarah van Rij for The New York TimesSarah van Rij for The New York TimesSarah van Rij for The New York TimesSarah van Rij for The New York TimesSarah van Rij for The New York TimesSarah van Rij for The New York TimesSarah van Rij for The New York TimesSarah van Rij for The New York TimesSeptember Dawn BottomsFor September Dawn Bottoms, who shot in and around Tulsa, Okla., the answer to what makes a photo cinematic flows from her personal point of view. “I photograph my own life all of the time,” she said. “Every photo is about me and what I’m seeing, I’m just never in it.”September Dawn Bottoms for The New York TimesSeptember Dawn Bottoms for The New York TimesSeptember Dawn Bottoms for The New York TimesSeptember Dawn Bottoms for The New York TimesSeptember Dawn Bottoms for The New York TimesSeptember Dawn Bottoms for The New York TimesSeptember Dawn Bottoms for The New York TimesSeptember Dawn Bottoms for The New York Times More

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      in Theater

      A Theater Photographer Senses a Broadway Bloom

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      For Sara Krulwich, who has shot productions for The New York Times for more than two decades, a series of recent assignments hinted at an industry revival.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.On the first evening in April, Sara Krulwich, a New York Times photographer, visited the Kraine Theater in the East Village, where Mike Daisey, an actor and monologuist, was rehearsing a show for which the seating capacity would be limited to 22. The restriction, Mr. Daisey said, reminded him of his earliest days as a performer, when he was thrilled if even a handful of people were in the audience.For about 20 minutes, Ms. Krulwich photographed Mr. Daisey, adjusting her shutter, she later said, to ensure that “the theater lights and my camera were going to talk to each other in a kindly way.”The next day, Ms. Krulwich photographed part of a performance at the Daryl Roth Theater at Union Square. And on Saturday, she shot a 36-minute performance at the historic St. James Theater in Midtown. Those assignments added up to her busiest stretch of theater work in more than a year.Theatrical productions, dormant since last spring, are resuming in New York City, the first tentative steps toward what actors, directors and others hope will be a strong comeback by the fall. And many in the theater world may see Ms. Krulwich’s presence as a reassuring sign.For more than two decades, she has been a Broadway and Off Broadway fixture, photographing about 100 shows a year, a body of work that led to her receiving a Tony Honor in 2018.After a yearlong absence, Ms. Krulwich began photographing performances and rehearsals, feeling her way back into familiar tasks and reflecting on early traces of a theatrical revival, which, she said, mirrored the stirrings of spring.“The blooms are beginning,” she said by phone. “Even if we’re not seeing the full flowering just yet.”Ms. Krulwich joined The Times as a staff photographer in 1979, working for the Metro, National and Sports desks before becoming the paper’s first culture photographer in 1994.At that time, she said, it was common for news organizations to run theater photographs handed out by producers that tended to present reality in the light most favorable to them. Ms. Krulwich, however, wanted to cover theater with the same journalistic approach that the paper employed while reporting on other events.Ms. Krulwich said that her approach was direct, telling producers that theater was looked upon as news inside The Times and should be documented that way. Eventually, she obtained access to almost every production in the city.Over the years, Ms. Krulwich has captured moments that have become a part of theater lore. She photographed developmental work on the Broadway production of Tony Kushner’s masterwork, “Angels in America.” In 1996, she took what is believed to be the last picture of Jonathan Larson, the writer and composer of “Rent,” hours before his death the night before the show’s first Off Broadway preview.Her Tony, in 2018, made her the first journalist recognized for excellence in the theater, an honor given to people, organizations and institutions that have contributed to the industry but are not eligible to win in other Tony categories.Returning to work inside venues she’s accustomed to, Ms. Krulwich said she took delight in seeing people she has known for many years and looked forward to a time when everyone connected to productions will, once again, be able to make a living.“It’s a small group of people,” she said. “Almost an extended family.”The day after photographing Mr. Daisey, Ms. Krulwich wore an N-95 mask and climbed a ladder at the Daryl Roth while shooting about 20 minutes of a performance of “Blindness,” an audio adaptation of the dystopian novel of the same name by the Portuguese writer José Saramago.And then, the following day, at the St. James, she photographed the dancer Savion Glover and the actor Nathan Lane at the 36-minute event they performed in front of a masked audience of 150.It was, noted Michael Paulson, a Times theater reporter, the first time in 387 days that there was activity inside a Broadway house.Ms. Krulwich said the performance was not the same as one that would have taken place before the coronavirus pandemic, but she added that she felt at home back inside the St. James and appreciated the hints of what is to come.“I must say, it felt familiar to me,” she said. “It’s just a little bit. It’s a tiptoe. It’s the doors opening a crack.” More

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      in Music

      Jack Bradley, Louis Armstrong Photographer and Devotee, Dies at 87

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      His trove of pictures formed the foundation of a vast personal collection that is now part of the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Queens.Jack Bradley at his home on Cape Cod in 2008. For 12 years he was Louis Armstrong’s fan, friend and photographer, as well as a collector of Armstrong memorabilia.Earl Wilson/The New York Times Jack Bradley, an ecstatic fan of Louis Armstrong’s who became his personal photographer, creating an indelible and intimate record of the jazz giant’s last dozen years, died on March 21 in Brewster, Mass., on Cape Cod. He was 87.The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, his wife, Nancy (Eckel) Bradley, said.Mr. Bradley first attended a concert by Armstrong and his band on Cape Cod in the mid-1950s. “I never heard anything like that,” he said in an interview in 2012 for a documentary about Armstrong, “Mr. Jazz,” directed by Michele Cinque. “My life was never the same.”Using a Brownie, Mr. Bradley snapped his first photo of Armstrong at another performance — the first of thousands he would take, first as a devotee and then as part of his inner circle. He took pictures of Armstrong at his home in Corona, Queens; in quiet moments backstage; at rehearsals and concerts; during recording sessions; and in dressing rooms.Mr. Bradley photographed Armstrong in his backyard in Queens in about 1960. In all, he took an estimated 6,000 photos of Armstrong.Louis Armstrong House Museum, Jack Bradley CollectionArmstrong and Mr. Bradley in Framingham, Mass., in 1967. “What we had in common,” Mr. Bradley said, “was this unending love for the music.”Louis Armstrong House Museum, via Associated Press“With that face and his beautiful smile,” Mr. Bradley was quoted as saying in a family-approved obituary, “how could anyone take a bad shot?”Mr. Bradley did more than take photographs. He became a voracious collector of anything related to Armstrong’s life and career: 16-millimeter films, reel-to-reel tapes of recordings and conversations, 78 r.p.m. discs and LPs, magazines, manuscripts, sheet music, telegrams, fan letters, figurines — even Armstrong’s slippers and suits, and a hotel laundry receipt that included “90 hankies,” which he famously used to wipe away perspiration during performances.“One day Jack went into Louis’s study and Louis was ripping up picture and letters into little tiny pieces,” Ms. Bradley said by phone. “Jack said, ‘No, you can’t do that!’ and Louis said, ‘You have to simplify.’ To Jack it was history and shouldn’t be thrown out.”Mr. Bradley’s refusal to simplify brought him renown as an Armstrong maven and led to a deal in 2005 in which the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation awarded Queens College a $480,000 grant to acquire his collection for the Louis Armstrong House Museum, where Armstrong and his wife, Lucille had lived.Mr. Bradley’s vast collection of Armstrong material, including fan mail, was acquired by the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Queens.Earl Wilson/The New York Times“Our cornerstone is Louis’s stuff,” said Ricky Riccardi, the museum’s director of research collections, referring to the vast trove of material that Armstrong left behind when he died in 1971. “That will always stand on its own. But Jack’s is the perfect complement. Louis was obsessed with documenting his life, and Jack was obsessed with documenting Louis’s life.”The museum’s collections, now housed at Queens College, will be moved to an education center nearing completion across the street from the museum, which has been closed during the Covid-19 pandemic.Mr. Bradley was not a salaried employee of Armstrong but was compensated for each photograph he took by Armstrong’s manager, Joe Glaser. To earn extra money, Mr. Bradley took some commercial photography jobs as well.“I don’t think he ever made more than $10,000 in any year,” his friend Mike Persico said.Dan Morgenstern, the jazz critic and historian, wrote in a Facebook tribute to Mr. Bradley that he had called him “One Shot” because “he would snap just once, in part to save film but also because he trusted his eye and timing.”Mr. Bradley captured Armstrong and the band leader Guy Lombardo during a rehearsal for a performance at Jones Beach on Long Island in the mid-1960s.Jack Bradley Collection, Louis Armstrong House Museum Mr. Bradley once photographed Armstrong naked from behind, in a dressing room. According to Mr. Morgenstern, Armstrong, when he heard the click of Mr. Bradley’s camera, said, “I want one of those!” An enlarged print of the photo hung in Armstrong’s den.John Bradley III was born on Jan 3, 1934, on Cape Cod, in Cotuit. His mother, Kathryn (Beatty) Bradley, had many jobs, including hairdresser. His father left the family when Jack was 10.A love of the sea inspired Mr. Bradley to attend the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, from which he graduated in 1958. He then left for Manhattan, where he immersed himself in jazz clubs and met Jeann Failows, who worked for Mr. Glaser helping to answer Armstrong’s mail. She and Mr. Bradley began dating, and Armstrong, seeing him with her, became convinced that Mr. Bradley was someone he could trust.“What we had in common,” Mr. Bradley told JazzTimes in 2011, using one of Armstrong’s nicknames, “was this unending love for the music. Pops never sought fame for fame’s sake. He just wanted to play his horn. Louis had a message — a message about excellence.“I’ve never met a man who had more genius for music,” he continued. “He could hear something once, and it was locked in his brain forever.”Mr. Bradley was often by my Armstrong’s side from 1959 to 1971, sometimes driving him to engagements and spending hours at Armstrong’s house. In all, the self-taught Mr. Bradley took an estimated 6,000 photos of Armstrong.Armstrong and the clarinetist Joe Muranyi rehearsing in 1967. Mr. Bradley took numerous photos of other jazz musicians as well. Jack Bradley, via Louis Armstrong House MuseumOne sequence of photos, taken in December 1959, shows Armstrong warming up before a concert at Carnegie Hall and jamming with his band before taking the stage, then performing, greeting friends afterward and signing autographs for fans outside the stage door.Mr. Bradley’s focus was not entirely on Armstrong. He photographed many other jazz artists and is said to have taken one of the last pictures of Billie Holiday in performance — at the Phoenix Theater in Greenwich Village in May 1959. (She died that July.)In the 1960s, he was a merchant marine and managed a jazz club, Bourbon Street, in Manhattan for a year. In the 1970s he was a partner in the New York Jazz Museum, in Midtown Manhattan. He also spent time as the road manager for the pianist Erroll Garner and the trumpeter Bobby Hackett.Mr. Bradley returned to live in Cape Cod after the jazz museum closed in 1977. He became a charter boat captain, lectured locally on jazz and hosted a local radio program on which he interviewed jazz musicians. His wife taught high school Spanish.Mr. Bradley, seated, in 2008 with Michael Cogswell, the executive director of the Louis Armstrong House Museum and Archives. “Louis was obsessed with documenting his life,” the museum’s Ricky Riccardi said, “and Jack was obsessed with documenting Louis’s life.”Earl Wilson/The New York TimesMr. Bradley crammed his massive jazz memorabilia collection — of which the Armstrongiana was only a part — into his modest house on Cape Cod in Harwich.“He had it in closets, the attic, shoe boxes, sea chests, the basement, the attic, everything but in oil drums,” said Mr. Persico, who has helped organize the archive.Mr. Bradley died in a nursing facility in Brewster. In addition to his wife, he is survived by his sisters, Emmy Shanley and Bonnie Jordan, and his brother, Bob.Ms. Bradley said she did not mind that her marriage had been, in effect, shared with Armstrong.“That was OK,” she said. “The third guy was a lot of fun.” More

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      in Theater

      New York Theaters Are Dark, but These Windows Light Up With Art

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      The Irish Repertory Theater is streaming poetry readings, and Playwrights Horizons and St. Ann’s Warehouse are showcasing art dealing with race and injustice.Like many cultural organizations, the Irish Repertory Theater in Manhattan has streamed pandemic programming on its website.But a few days ago, the theater added a new sort of broadcast to its repertoire, setting up two 60-inch screens in windows that face the sidewalk, installing speakers high up on the building facade and airing a collection of films that show people reading poems in Ireland, London and New York.On a recent morning, Ciaran O’Reilly, the Rep’s producing director, stood by the theater on West 22nd Street, gazing at the screens as they displayed Joseph Aldous, an actor in Britain, reading “An Advancement of Learning,” a narrative poem by Seamus Heaney describing a brief standoff with a rat along a river bank.“These are not dark windows,” O’Reilly said. “They are lit up with poetry, with music, with the words of actors who are performing.”In the past year, theaters and other performing arts institutions in New York have turned to creative means to bring works to the public, sometimes also injecting a bit of life into otherwise shuttered facades. Those arrangements continue, even as the State of New York has announced that arts venues can reopen in April at one-third capacity and some outdoor performances, like Shakespeare in the Park, are scheduled to resume.The panes of glass, though, have provided a safe space. Late last year, for instance, the artists Christopher Williams, Holly Bass and Raja Feather Kelly performed at different times in the lobby or in a smaller vestibule-like part of the building in Chelsea occupied by New York Live Arts. All were visible through glass to those outside.Three more performances by Kelly of “Hysteria,” in which he assumes the role of a pink-hued extraterrestrial and explores what Live Arts’ website calls “pop culture and its displacement of queer Black subjectivity,” are scheduled for April 8-10.The Mexican-American artist Ken Gonzales-Day’s photographs of sculptures are on display at Playwrights Horizons.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnother street-level performance took place behind glass last December in Downtown Brooklyn, where the Brooklyn Ballet staged nine 20-minute shows of select dances from its “Nutcracker.”The ballet turned its studio into what its artistic director, Lynn Parkerson, called a “jewel box” theater; chose dances that kept masked ballerinas socially distanced; and used barricades on the sidewalk to limit audiences.“It was a way to bring some people back to something they love that they enjoyed that they might be forgetting about,” Parkerson said in an interview. “It did feel like a real performance.”She said that live performances were planned for April and would include ballet members in “Pas de Deux,” set to Jean-Philippe Rameau’s “Gavotte et Six Doubles,” with live music by the pianist Simone Dinnerstein.Pop-up concerts have been arranged by the Kaufman Music Center on the Upper West Side, in a storefront — the address is not given but is described on the center’s website as “not hard to find” — north of Columbus Circle.Those performances, running through late April, are announced at the storefront the same day, to limit crowd sizes and encourage social distancing. Participants have included the violinist Gil Shaham, the mezzo-soprano Chrystal E. Williams, the Gabrielle Stravelli Trio and JACK Quartet.St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn is displaying Julian Alexander and Khadijat Oseni’s “Supremacy Project,” public art that addresses the nature of injustice in American society.The word “supremacy” is superimposed on a photograph of police officers in riot gear, and there are images by Michael T. Boyd of Sandra Bland, Elijah McClain and Emmett Till.And at Playwrights Horizons in Midtown, the Mexican-American artist Ken Gonzales-Day is placing photographs of sculptures of human figures in display cases, encouraging viewers to reckon with definitions of beauty and race. Those displays are part of rotating public art series organized by the artist, activist, and writer Avram Finkelstein and the set and costume designer David Zinn.The aim, Finkelstein said in January when the series was announced, was to display work that “makes constructive use of dormant facades to create a transient street museum” and to “remind the city of its buoyancy and originality.”O’Reilly, at the Irish Rep, said the theater heard last year from Amy Holmes, the executive director of the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation, who thought the theater might provide a good venue to air some of the short films the organization had commissioned to make poetry part of an immersive experience.The series being shown at the theater, called “Poetic Reflections: Words Upon the Window Pane,” comprises 21 short pieces by the Irish filmmaker Matthew Thompson.“These are not dark windows,” said Ciaran O’Reilly of the Irish Repertory Theater. “They are lit up with poetry, with music, with the words of actors who are performing.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThey show contemporary poets reading their own works as well as poets and actors reading works by others, including William Butler Yeats and J.M. Synge, and were produced in collaboration with Poetry Ireland in Dublin, Druid Theater in Galway, the 92nd Street Y in New York and Poet in the City in London.“I think there is something special about encountering the arts in an unexpected way in the city, especially an art form like poetry,” Holmes said.The readers in the films include people who were born in Ireland, immigrants to Ireland, people who live in Britain and a few from the United States, like Denice Frohman, who was born and raised in New York City.Frohman was on the theater’s screens on Tuesday night, reading lines like “the beaches are gated & no one knows the names of the dead” from her poem “Puertopia,” when Erin Madorsky and Dorian Baker stopped to listen.Baker said he saw the films playing in the window as symbolizing a “revitalization of poetic energy.”Madorsky had regularly attended theatrical performances before the pandemic but now missed that connection, she said, and was gratified to happen upon a dramatic reading while walking home.She added that the sound of the verses being read stood in contrast to what she called the city’s “standard” backdrop of blaring horns, sirens and rumbling garbage trucks.“I think it’s wonderful,” she said. “There’s something so soothing about her voice, it just pulled me in.” More

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      ‘Martha: A Picture Story’ Review: Snapshots of a Career

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘Martha: A Picture Story’ Review: Snapshots of a CareerThis documentary recounts the work of Martha Cooper, a photographer instrumental in establishing the validity of street art.The photographer Martha Cooper.Credit…Janette Beckman/UtopiaMarch 16, 2021, 7:00 a.m. ETMartha: A Picture StoryDirected by Selina MilesDocumentary, Biography1h 22mFind TicketsWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.“Martha: A Picture Story” turns the camera around on Martha Cooper, a photographer who captured the era when graffiti-covered subway cars crisscrossed New York, and who was among the first to give serious consideration to the artists who scrawled on those trains. The book “Subway Art,” Cooper’s 1984 collaboration with the photographer Henry Chalfant, developed an international underground following, providing a stylistic template — Cooper’s word — for aspiring graffiti writers.In this documentary, directed by Selina Miles, Cooper and her associates take us through her career, from a stint in the Peace Corps in Thailand to her work snapping street scenes for The New York Post. Now in her 70s, Cooper is still working, and Miles trails her as she seeks to document a neighborhood in southwest Baltimore, her hometown. (In the sort of interplay between subject and film crew that “Martha: A Picture Story” could have used more of, Cooper at one point asks that the movie camera be turned off — she needs to gain her subjects’ trust first.)[embedded content]Cooper is unafraid of risks. Near the beginning and end, we watch her accompany street artists in Germany on furtive missions. There is poignancy in seeing her reminisce with Jay Edlin (known as J.SON), a graffiti artist and historian, at a cleaned-up subway station in the Bronx.The film does a fair job of explaining Cooper’s temperament. (An editor who tried to assign her to photograph pollen for National Geographic found that wasn’t a great fit.) Ultimately, though, the photos are the thing. A conventional biographical portrait almost feels redundant. Cooper has already documented her own life story.Martha: A Picture StoryNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 22 minutes. Rent or buy on Amazon, Apple TV and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Ricky Powell, 59, Dies; Chronicled Early Hip-Hop and Downtown New York

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRicky Powell, 59, Dies; Chronicled Early Hip-Hop and Downtown New YorkProlific with his point-and-shoot camera, he captured essential images of the Beastie Boys, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Run-DMC, Andy Warhol and more.The photographer Ricky Powell in 2012. An inveterate walker, he pounded the New York pavement with his camera and snapped photos of whatever caught his fancy.Credit…Janette BeckmanPublished More