Burn lower left

In 1938 William P. Gottlieb was twenty-one, selling advertising for the Washington Post and writing a weekly jazz column for its Sunday paper. For two weeks the Post sent a photographer with him. Then it decided it could not afford one. Gottlieb traded in hundreds of records, most of them promotional copies sent to him for review, for a Speed Graphic press camera, film and flashbulbs.¹

The camera set the terms. Loaded with film holders, a Speed Graphic took two sheets of film, and so two exposures. He was not paid for his pictures, and the supplies were bulky and expensive, so he kept each session to three or four shots. His portraits, the Library of Congress writes, are “not candids or pictures selected from dozens of exposures.” All of this happened before the shutter was released.¹

Three stages

The Library bought Gottlieb’s collection in 1995: some 1,600 negatives and color transparencies, with prints and small contact prints. Those contact prints, it notes, “are often annotated with cropping, burning, and other special instructions,” and it describes what they make possible: “One can follow the artist’s work process by examining first a raw negative, then an annotated contact print, and finally a finished, published product.”² We followed it, picture by picture: the whole negative, with a pale frame around what was published, found by matching the published print to the negative, and the colored marks of the contact print traced where they fall.

Burn lower left

Louis Armstrong at Carnegie Hall, about April 1947. The negative is square, and much of it is ceiling. Above the contact print, on a tab of tape: “See GUIDE PRINT for Density & Cropping.” On the card below it: “3 – 16x20 · Burn lower left”: three prints at 16 × 20, with the lower left given extra exposure under the enlarger, so that it prints darker. Green strokes on the print mark the place: Armstrong’s white shirt.³

The published picture keeps the man, the hand and the horn, and lets the room go. Nothing in it was invented after the fact. Everything in the published print is on the negative. What changed is the edge, and the weight of a white shirt.

Who stays in the picture

A dressing room, about June 1946, and Billie Holiday is in it twice. In the foreground she sits with her back to the camera, in the same diamond-patterned blouse, double string of pearls and hoop earrings as the face in the mirror. In the glass, she smiles. At the mirror’s right edge, a man in a white shirt holds up a press camera: from where he stands, the photographer himself (our reading).⁴

The annotated contact print already stops short of him. The published picture goes much further: it keeps only the reflection, the pineapples and the dog’s head, and it stands upright. Of the two Billies, Gottlieb published the one in the glass. Another negative from the same assignment opened Down Beat’s “Through the Looking Glass” on June 17, 1946.⁵

The book

Burn Lower Left shows twenty of Gottlieb’s photographs, each on its own spread, grouped by the kind of decision it shows: orders to the printer, a square in grease pencil, who stays in the picture, the trick of a mirror or a double exposure, and ten negatives from Minton’s Playhouse in September 1947. On the right of each spread, the contact print and the published picture, where the Library keeps them, and the orders transcribed word for word.