Jerry Stoll was a photographer, film-maker, and writer who passed away in 2004. By supporting this project, you have an opportunity to help preserve an important piece of history from both an artistic and documentary perspective as well as to receive beautiful photographs as a premium for your contribution.
We are using this Fotofund project to raise money to archive Jerry’s photography. This includes high resolution scans of 500 of his images; creating a digital database; purchasing archival storage containers; and organizing his negatives, prints, and contact sheets.
Jerry’s work as resident photographer during the first eight years of the Monterey Jazz Festival created a series of unique visual documents and a large photographic library. The early years of the Festival when Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, and Duke Ellington shared their musical stage with the new creative generation of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Ornette Coleman marked a very special period in the development of this music.
Although Jerry’s photographs of the great jazz musicians represent only a portion of his visual art, he considered it to have special significance because of our African American cultural heritage– a dynamic factor in shaping the art, music, drama, and literature of the Americas during the 20th century.
Working out of San Francisco as a photographer in the 1950s and ‘60s, Jerry captured what he called the “San Francisco Renaissance.” His photography of this cultural movement includes images of the Beat Generation– the artists, poets, dancers, and musicians– as well as the Italian and Chinese communities all coexisting within the neighborhood of North Beach. Jerry illustrates this scene with his long out-of-print photographic book, I am a Lover.
By the late 1960s, Jerry put his photography on hold to focus on making the award-winning documentary film about the Vietnam War, Sons and Daughters. This led him to create American Documentary Films, which produced films and distributed more than 200 documentaries on a wide spectrum of social issues. Among these was the film, Huey – on the Black Panther Party; and The Pentagon Papers, filmed with Daniel Ellsberg.
Jerry returned to still photography in the late seventies, but the main focus of his last 20-plus years was a return to the subjects of his university education in history and philosophy, researching and writing a book on ancient art history which fundamentally re-evaluates the social history of art and language.
In 1996, the Library of Congress, under the direction of Jazz composer/performer Anthony Brown, produced a six-hour oral history of Jerry Stoll’s personal and visual association with American jazz.
The next step after archiving his photography is to produce a book of Jerry’s jazz images as well as reprinting I am a Lover. Please help us preserve this piece of our cultural history so that we may be able to pass it on generations from now.
For specific choice of images and more information please contact Casey Stoll at jstollphoto@gmail.com.
The following eight images are available as an “Introductory Collector” Fine Art Print.
Billie Holiday with her dog backstage, Monterey Jazz Festival, 1958
Bongo Players, San Francisco, 1961
Charles Mingus, Monterey Jazz Festival, 1964
Duke Ellington and Billie Strayhorn backstage, Monterey Jazz Festival, 1964
David Lambert, Jon Hendricks, Ike Isaacs and Annie Ross with Gild Mahones
Rehearsal Hall, Monterey Jazz Festival, 1960
Louis Armstrong, Monterey Jazz Festival, 1958
Miles Davis, Monterey Jazz Festival, 1964
Dave Brubeck and Eugene Joseph Wright, Monterey Jazz Festival, 1959
The following four posters are each available for a $50 pledge.
Billie Holiday
Ella Fitzgerald
Charles Mingus
Louis Armstrong
The following rare American Documentary Films poster is available for a $150 pledge.
American Documentary Films
This campaign is a flexible campaign– The campaign creator keeps all funds pledged regardless of whether or not the campaigns meets its stated funding goal.