Reintroducing Don Bronstein, Music Photographer Extraordinaire

On the partitions of a gallery at Triennale di Milano, acquainted faces snap you into their second with startling immediacy. It’s the primary European exhibition dedicated to the work of Don Bronstein, whose work at midcentury was a harbinger of a brand new casualness in images. He makes you see icons in a method that you haven’t seen them earlier than. The new exhibit, “Don Bronstein and the Jazz Scene in Chicago 1953–1968,” opened along with Milan Design Week, and it places Bronstein again within the public eye for the primary time in virtually half a century.

You really feel like you realize the topics and also you’re within the room with them in a vanished world the place all people is aware of that bars are alleged to scent like cigarette smoke, not faux citrus-y cleansing merchandise. Don Bronstein photographed a dream checklist of artists that included Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Sarah Vaughan, Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Etta James, Eartha Kitt, Harry Belafonte, and Sammy Davis Jr.

Bronstein’s daughter, Julie Hillman, mirrored on her father’s legacy: “What makes the exhibit so powerful is the intimacy you feel between him and the musicians he photographed. The trust is visible, the personal connection is in every frame. One of my favorite images is Louis Armstrong alone, rehearsing before a show in an empty stadium, in shorts. Just my father and Louis Armstrong in a quiet moment. And then on the side wall, the blind man walking down Maxwell Street with his electric guitar no personal contact at all between my father and the subject, yet you feel that same depth. He simply saw something true and captured it. That contrast says everything about who he was as an artist—his connection with people wasn’t just about access or relationships. The connection lived in his eye.”

Bronstein died on the younger age of 41 in Mexico in 1968, whereas on project for Playboy. It was an period when the typical life expectancy for males was 67, and obituaries for individuals who died of their 50s recurrently listed “old age” as a explanation for demise. In 1968, there was no means for a physician to flag issues that may be noticed now. Bronstein missed seeing his younger daughters hit life’s milestones.

Even so, Bronstein completed an unbelievable quantity. He gained a Grammy for his 1963 album cowl photograph of Barbra Streisand. In his time as Art Director and photographer for the legendary Chess Records, he shot over 500 album covers for Chess and a slew of different labels, with Universal Music Group, Columbia Records, Argo, Verve and Atlantic Records among the many huge names.

Despite forming the visible identification of so many nice artists, Bronstein’s identify and oeuvre drifted into obscurity till his daughters introduced their unbelievable household archive out of storage and into the general public eye. In Hillman’s personal phrases, “Walking into the exhibition for the first time with my mother and sister, seeing my father’s work at this scale, in this context was simply overwhelming. He never had a show of this magnitude in his lifetime, and knowing what it would have meant to him left us all speechless.”

“Don Bronstein and the Jazz Scene in Chicago 1953–1968” is on view at Triennale Milano till May 17.