William P. Gottlieb

William Paul Gottlieb (January 28, 1917 – April 23, 2006) was an American photographer and newspaper columnist who is best known for his classic photographs of the leading performers of the Golden Age of American jazz in the 1930s and 1940s. Gottlieb's photographs are among the best known and widely reproduced images of this jazz era.

Gottlieb took pictures of hundreds of prominent jazz musicians and personalities, typically while they were playing or singing at well-known New York City jazz clubs. His subjects included Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie, Earl Hines, Jo Stafford, Thelonious Monk, Stan Kenton, Ray McKinley, Benny Goodman, Coleman Hawkins, Louis Jordan, Ella Fitzgerald, Toots Thielemans, Cab Calloway, and Benny Carter. In accordance with his wishes, Gottlieb's photographs were placed in the public domain in 2010; many are used in Wikipedia and other public domain or freely licensed venues.

Biography

Gottlieb was born on January 28, 1917, in the Canarsie neighborhood of Brooklyn, and grew up in Bound Brook, New Jersey where his father was in the building and lumber business. He graduated from Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in 1938 with a degree in economics. While at Lehigh, Gottlieb wrote for the weekly campus newspaper and was the editor-in-chief of The Lehigh Review. In his last year of college, he began writing a weekly jazz column for The Washington Post. While writing for the Post, Gottlieb taught economics at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland southwest of Baltimore. After the Post determined that it would not pay a photographer to accompany Gottlieb on his visits to jazz clubs, Gottlieb borrowed a press camera and began taking pictures for his column.

Gottlieb was drafted into the Army Air Corps in 1943 and served as a photography and a classifications officer. Many of his filmstrips won awards from the Canadian Film Board and the Educational Film Librarians Association. He also wrote and illustrated children's books including several Golden Books like The Four Seasons, Tigers Adventure, and Laddie the Superdog. He wrote educational books such as Science Facts You Won't Believe and Space Flight.

Sy Oliver, September 1946, by William P. GottliebApart from his photography career, William Gottlieb also played amateur tennis. He and his son Steven were often ranked the number one father-and-son team on the East Coast, and were twice ranked among the top ten teams in the US.

William Gottlieb was married to Delia Potofsky, the daughter of Jacob Potofsky. They had four children, Barbara, Steven, Richard, and Edward. William died of complications from a stroke on April 23, 2006, in Great Neck, New York.