Collection: Carol Friedman

Carol Friedman's photographs have been widely published in magazines such as The New Yorker, Esquire, The New York Times, Gentleman's Quarterly, Rolling Stone, Forbes, and The London Times, and appear on the covers of numerous biographies and memoirs. Her classic portraits of singers and musicians may be seen on hundreds of jazz, soul, and classical album and CD covers, and are held in private collections here and abroad. Carol’s three-decade presence in the music industry included positions at several record labels—as chief photographer and art director for Blue Note Records, and creative director for Elektra Entertainment and Motown. She has photographed and designed the album packages for many notable recording artists—from Nina Simone and Quincy Jones to Eric B. and Rakim and Jessye Norman—but it is her photography sessions with the jazz legends and the keepers of the flame on the new frontier that bring her the most pleasure. Friedman began photographing jazz icons at age nineteen; impelled by the music and her studies with Life Magazine photographer Phillipe Halsman; embracing Halsman’s imperative—“a portrait is successful only if it reveals the emotional identity of your subject.”

In the preface of her book The Jazz Pictures, Stanley Crouch says of Friedman: “The heat of the image is what she seeks and that’s what she gets so often and with such originality that we are sometimes caught off guard; there is the temperature of life attending her images. The photographer uses the term “inciting the image” to describe her method of creating a relationship between herself and circumstances that will allow a soul to appear for that necessary split second. Under her virtuoso nudging, their senses and their memories fuse and we see what makes them charismatic or we understand something even music cannot express, which is how this anatomical form or these facial features achieve telling power in space. In that way, her work is the counterpart of the art of the invisible, which is music.”

A lifelong New Yorker, Friedman lives and works in Soho, and frequents the Village Vanguard for continued inspiration. At present, she is photographing and designing album covers and book projects and editing The Music Is The Magic, her documentary film on the life and work of singer Abbey Lincoln.