SAM GOODYEAR
ART BEAT
Hometown Oneonta, July 10, 2009
If you have a friend or family member who loves jazz and are looking for a birthday or Christmas present, or a present out of the blue (the best kind, in our humble opinion), then you are doubly in luck.
You will definitely please that person with a brand-new, stupendously moving and beautiful book, “Jazz Studies,” a feast of photographs by Joann Krivin.
When you riffle through it quickly before purchase, as with pistachio nuts and Krispy-Kreme doughnuts, one will not suffice: you will not be able to resist obtaining a copy for yourself.
And even if you don’t know much about jazz, or think you care very little for it, you will become a convert.
Joann Krivin, who lives in Oneonta, to which she and her jazz clarinetist husband retired a few years ago after careers in New York City and New Jersey, came to jazz after years of passion for classical music, particularly opera.
It was her husband who opened the door and carried her across the threshold, so to speak. Her love and understanding of the medium are palpable in the scores of sumptuously black-and-white portraits of the artists captured by her modest and lyrical eye.
One feels the immediacy of the moment, musically, artistically, even to the point of being able almost to pinpoint the temperature of the room, the time of day or night, the heartbeat of the performer.
The intimacy is commanding yet never intrusive, and each turn of the page arrests one’s attention and inspires wonder and curiosity.
We would not be so fatuous as to say one can actually hear the music, but we do confess to a hunger for it as result of viewing these stirring images.
Ms. Krivin prefers black and white to color for the call to the imagination and interpretive powers of the viewer (as well as the photographer) the deceptively simpler visual palette engenders.
You will appreciate the myriad hues of dark and light on display here. But it is not just photographic skill that is required for what she has achieved so eloquently.“If you don’t love jazz,” she says of the undertaking,”you better give it up.”
As if having an artist of her stature among us weren’t enough, the book itself has been produced by a high-quality publishing house right here as well: the Argian Press, under the direction of founder David M. Hayes, headquartered in Oneonta. As I am so fond of saying over and over again, aren’t we lucky?
And our luck looks as though it will continue: Ms. Krivin is now working on photographic portraits of old dolls.
Not the classic, obviously important and “arty” china variety; rather, the used and worn dolls found in attics, yard sales and antique shops, patiently awaiting their comeback thanks to this keen and respectful observer.
Be on the lookout.