23.07.10
The Acclaimed British Jazz Photographer William Ellis Explains How He Became a Pro
William Ellis is a rare and perhaps unique photographer. One who worked for some of the world’s leading camera manufacturers before he decided that enough was enough and his future lay in making his passion his career. Now a successful professional photographer, he explains how his love of jazz was the key to his success.
Jazz came into my life when I was very young listening to Frank Sinatra records my mother would play. The sounds and layers of every instrument made me stop, listen and wonder how anything could sound so great. I had no idea this was any kind of jazz, I don’t think I’d even heard the word jazz.
Then The Beatles happened and I didn’t discover that the music I liked so much was called jazz until later, much later, when I began listening to the legendary Miles Davis.My passion for photography started when I was 17. The first exhibition I went to was by Bill Brandt. I was inspired – and dumbstruck. I decided to shoot black and white and learn to print – I photographed family and friends and saved enough money to set up my own darkroom, eventually with a Leitz enlarger.
In jazz I found the music that says so much to me. It’s a compelling subject with so many facets: the people, the instruments, the environment, the lifestyle. I’ve spent over 20 years building an archive of images of many of the most influential players in jazz, performing at major festivals and clubs in the UK – greats such as Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie and Herbie Hancock.
My work has always been driven by the music and the powerful visual heritage of the genre exemplified by photographers such as William Claxton and Herman Leonard and my friend and fellow Brit Terry Cryer. But photography had always been a passionate hobby, never a profession.
My actual profession and 25-year career in photography was on the other side of the fence with three major players in the professional photographic market: Keith Johnson, Hasselblad and Broncolor, where my role was in technical sales. Fortunately, each of these companies recognised the value of seminars and masterclasses in developing photographers, and I was directly involved in organising these events with many gifted photographers over the years, including Cornel Lucas, Patrick Lichfield and John Swannell. It had been a great career, but after 25 years of helping others follow their dreams, I knew it was time to follow my own.
In 2002 I decided to make my first foray into the international arena and went to Havana, Cuba to photograph a jazz festival with a couple of Leicas, three lenses, an F4 and an 80-200mm lens in a small Domke bag. It was there that my photographic adventure really began.
The people in the festival press office liked my pictures when I visited them to try to get press accreditation. They gave me a ‘personal invitation pass’ and the wonderful madness began. I was soon in a taxi with a singer from New York and her Cuban husband heading to an exhibition where I met and showed my work to a guy from Cape Town, who turned out to be the chief executive of the city’s jazz festival. He invited me to exhibit at the festival in a few months’ time. I was on my way.
The Cape Town Jazz Festival is one of the world’s biggest and while I was there I met the marketing people for the festival, who a year later emailed me to ask if I would be the guest visual artist with a 40-picture show in 2004. Not only did I accept and exhibit, but I was also able to photograph James Brown, Alicia Keys, Macy Gray and Buddy Guy. I was on a roll.
This blueprint of festivals and exhibitions soon proved to be a way to start developing contacts worldwide, and over the next few years I was able to expand my archive and photograph many more jazz greats.
Over the next four years my work was shown at festivals and galleries across the world, from Amsterdam to Hong Kong to Las Vegas. A particularly significant moment for me was the invitation I received to present the inaugural international exhibition at the American Jazz Museum in Kansas City in 2005. I even got to photograph at the legendary jazz clubs in New York and Los Angeles. My passion was now my career.
My income derives from several different areas: through print sales at exhibitions and galleries and from online sales, as well as selling directly to interior designers. Commissions come from musicians, as well as from record companies, promoters and music magazines.
I promote my sales online by having links with several major UK jazz festivals from which I have a significant collection of images. I produce a section featuring those images on my sales site so that visitors can order photographs from concerts which they may have attended in previous years.
My website is a search-engine friendly Flash site of pure photography for commission and I direct the sales function to a separate site. I also recently launched a blog, which is WordPress based and customised to match my website design. However, finding the time to update is always a problem. There’s always another shoot around the corner. It has a become a jazz life!
www.william-ellis.com
www.william-ellis.com/blog
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