“In Blue Notes in Black and White you sense an author consumed and excited by his subject. He’s synthesized loads of the literature and argument around jazz, and he builds particularly on recent works of historiography.”

Ben Ratliff | New York Times

“Bold, ruminative and personal, jazz music poses a challenge to the ace lensman that is answered repeatedly in these pages. Namely, how to capture the elusive internal make-up of any given jazz musician in a two-dimensional image that acts as a portal to the artist’s soul. . . . Ideal reading while spinning Monk or Kind of Blue. Four stars.”

Colin Fleming | MOJO Music Magazine

“Cawthra brings a deep appreciation for jazz and the photography that captured the ecstasy of the music and performing and the disappointments felt by black musicians subject to race discrimination and personal demons.”

Booklist

“This is a highly engaging and deeply engaged meditation on the development of the modern jazz photography tradition. Cawthra’s probing analysis of how ‘the photographic culture of jazz’ helped make jazz visible perceptively illuminates and contributes significantly to the fascinating, revealing, and ongoing debate surrounding not just the jazz image, notably the African American jazz image, but also jazz history, the meanings of jazz, and indeed the role of jazz in the making of modern American culture.”

Waldo E. Martin, Jr. | author of No Coward Soldiers: Black Cultural Politics in Postwar America

“This first in-depth history of jazz photography provides the reader with a three-dimensional view of its fascinating subject, illuminating the music, the media, and the makers—the foreground and the background.”

Dan Morgenstern | author of Living with Jazz

“Benjamin Cawthra, writing with grace and a formidable command of jazz history and American culture, makes us see the sounds, the social relations, and the myths of jazz as he ably uncovers the personal and institutional networks of musicians, writers, magazines, and record companies in which jazz photography developed. Even as Blue Notes in Black and White casts a sharp eye on photographic aesthetics—its pages brim with bracing insights into Gjon Mili’s informal but magisterial style, Francis Wolff’s use of chiaroscuro, and Herman Leonard’s concept of the sculpted face—it also works as a groundbreaking history of jazz criticism. At its best, this excellent book serves as a model for a multisensory music criticism: while reading it, I often felt I was hearing the music more deeply.”

John Gennari | author of Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics

“Cawthra traces the history of jazz photography from the 1930s to the 1960s through the stories of prominent, mainly African-American musicians (Miles Davis, John Coltrane) and the white men who photographed them for magazines and album covers.. . Analyzing photographs can get tedious quickly, but Cawthra wisely contextualizes them with anecdotes and stories that place the reader in the moment.”

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