MICHELLE MARGETTS
Jim’s exemplary work capturing the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1960 and 1963 bookended his intensely productive sojourn in New York City. The Monterey Jazz Festival was the brainstorm of Jimmy Lyons, a prominent jazz radio broadcaster in San Francisco, and it pioneered the use of the twenty-acre Monterey Fairgrounds as a major musical venue, starting on October 3, 1958. It’s one of the longest consecutively running jazz festivals.
In my mind’s eye I can see corduroy-coated, desert boot–wearing Jim prowling around the fog-shrouded, oak-studded Monterey Fairgrounds with his Leica M2 and his 50 mm lens in 1960, a relative nobody in the photography world at the time. It was so early in his career. Jim was fresh out of the Air Force, and I’m quite sure he didn’t have but a few fixed lenses and a couple of camera bodies, if that. Most likely he was relying on his 50 mm lens, wide open, and Tri-X film to be pushed later in the darkroom.
I seem to remember Jim telling me he preferred the “normal lens” because it came closest to capturing what you saw with your own eyes. He shot full frame, editing through the lens in real time with no lighting equipment and no net. Jim never even cropped a shot. He used to say, “It’s either in the negative or it’s not.”
Hat seller at the Monterey Jazz Festival, Monterey, California, 1960
JOHN COLTRANE on stage at the Monterey Jazz Festival, Monterey, 1960
