Art Kane, born Arthur Kanofsky, was a fashion and music photographer through the fifties to the nineties, til he committed suicide aged 69. As a new freelance photographer working for Esquire, he assembled jazz musicians in the fifties to take probably the most well-known photo in the history of jazz, known as 'A Great Day in Harlem'. That was just the start of his career photographing the famous. But to him performance shots were a waste of time. He said 'you have to own people... twist them into what you want to say about them.' Andy Warhol reckoned that his work was 'usually a dramatic interpretation of personality.' His photos could be provocative and were sometimes rejected by magazines for irreverence.
In the sixties he turned to fashion and celebrity portraiture, pioneering the use of wide-angle lens for close-up portraiture, and using deeply saturated colour.
He photographed The Who, Cream, The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, The Doors, Aretha Franklin, Janis Joplin, to name a few, but always in interesting situations: he said he wanted to interpret the human scene rather than simply record it.
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