WILLIAM CLAXTON:William Claxton, who has died aged 80, was a master photographer whose images of Chet Baker helped fuel the jazz trumpeter's rise to stardom in the 1950s and whose fashion photographs of his wife modelling a topless swimsuit were groundbreaking years later.
In a career spanning more than half a century, Claxton also became well known for his work with celebrities including Frank Sinatra and Steve McQueen, who became a close friend.
He gained most recognition for his photographs of jazz performers including Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Mel Torme, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk and Stan Getz. But it was his photographs of Baker that helped teach him the true meaning of the word "photogenic".
"I was up all night developing, when the face appeared in the developing tray," Claxton told The Irish Timesin 2005. "A tough demeanour and a good physique but an angelic face with pale white skin and, the craziest thing, one tooth missing - he'd been in a fight. I thought, my God, that's Chet Baker."
Claxton observed that, over the years, he had sometimes taken photographs of ordinary-looking people whose faces would just pop out on film. He said that was what happened with Baker.
His 1951 photograph of Baker started a relationship that continued for the next five or six years as he chronicled Baker's rise to fame as one of the most visible jazz performers of the decade.
Claxton called photography "jazz for the eyes" and tried to capture the often dynamic tension between the artist, the instrument and the music.
"For the photographer, the camera is like a jazz musician's sax. It's the tool that you would like to be able to ignore, but you have to have it to convey your thoughts and whatever you want to express through it," Claxton told jazz writer Don Heckman some years ago.
Almost as much as the recordings themselves, the photographs reach into the essence of making music. "That's where jazz and photography have always come together for me," Claxton told Heckman. "They're alike in their improvisation and their spontaneousness. They happen at the same moment that you're hearing something and you're seeing something, and you record it and it's frozen forever."
Born in Pasadena, California, in 1927, Claxton grew up in an upper middle-class family in La Cañada Flintridge. His mother was a musician and his older brother played piano; Claxton said he tried the keyboard but had no patience for it.
He started collecting records, especially jazz, at an early age. At 12, he was taking the bus to downtown Los Angeles to hear jazz greats, including Ellington, at the Orpheum Theatre. Years later, he would go to jazz clubs and take photographs of up-and-coming musicians just for fun.
An incident he recounted in the introduction to his book Jazz: William Claxtonspeaks of a more innocent time between celebrities and photographers.
Claxton recalled taking his old 4x5 Speed Graphic to photograph Parker, the legendary saxophonist, at the Tiffany Club in downtown LA. He hung out with Parker until the place closed and then took him and some of his young fans to his parents' home in La Cañada Flintridge, where he improvised a studio in his bedroom and posed Parker with his fans in a formal portrait.
He said he had never seen Parker, whose life was cut short by drug problems, look happier.
Claxton gave up college when Richard Bock, who was starting Pacific Jazz Records, hired him as a photographer. He created a vast array of memorable album covers for the label.
Towards the end of the 1950s, he started moving into fashion. He married Peggy Moffitt, who was the muse of fashion designer Rudi Gernreich. In the early 1960s, they created the photographs of the topless bathing suit designed by Gernreich with Moffitt as the model.
"That was a big family decision," Claxton told Heckman. "Whew. Was I going to let my wife show her breasts in public? We hassled about it for a long time. Finally, we decided to employ nepotism. Only I could photograph it, we would have control of the pictures and Peggy would never model the suit in public. And it worked out okay. The pictures were tasteful, I thought, Peggy looked great, and it was historically a breakthrough for women, that they could feel free enough to show the beauty of their breasts."
Claxton also directed the film Basic Black, viewed by many as the first fashion video and now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
While on assignment for Lifemagazine, Claxton photographed Sinatra at a recording session at Capitol Records, Barbra Streisand in New York, and McQueen. All were notoriously tough assignments, stars distrustful of the media and reluctant to be photographed. But he gained their trust and developed a friendship with McQueen through their common love of cars and motorbikes.
His work is collected in many books, including Jazz: William Claxton, Young Chet, Claxography, Steve McQueenand Jazzlife.
Claxton is survived by his wife of 49 years, son Christopher, sister Colleen Lewis, and several nieces and nephews.
William Claxton: born October 12th, 1927; died October 11th, 2008