10 years of iconic jazz photos in public domain

KUVO’s celebration of Jazz Appreciation Month in April is a great occasion to remind our audience of a virtual treasure trove of iconic jazz photographs taken from 1938 to 1948, and they’re all in the public domain.  Larry Appelbaum in the Music Division at the Library of Congress joined “First Take with Lando and Chavis” to talk about photographer William Gottlieb and the collection.

“Almost all of Gottlieb’s shots were done on location,” said Appelbaum.   “He’s capturing jazz in the moment of creation, and he’s doing it with a fairly bulky Speed Graphic camera.”

Appelbaum says the Library of Congress has been digitizing photos from the Gottlieb collection since 1995.  “It’s a great gift from the Gottlieb family.  It speaks to the vision of Bill Gottlieb, and (the photos) are now in use around the world.”  The entire collection of 1,601 images entered the public domain in 2010.  Both high resolution TIFF and JPEG formats are available at the Library of Congress www.flickr.com site.

NOTE FROM THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS: “Although copyright restrictions are lifted, rights of privacy and publicity may apply. Users of photographs in the Gottlieb collection are responsible for clearing any privacy or publicity rights associated with the use of the images.”

Other Library of Congress image collections (baseball, President Lincoln, WWI, etc.) are available at www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress.

More on the story of William Gottlieb is in this Library of Congress news release.