Obituary: Jamie Hodgson

* Jamie Hodgson, photographer of jazz musicians. Died age 76.

Jamie Hodgson is the photographer whose haunting images helped to immortalise the greatest stars of jazz.

The former fashion photographer, who died of cancer on Sunday, took his stark black and white pictures of musicians including Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong during the 1950s and 1960s.

The pictures, which amounted to a hall of fame of American jazz greats from Dizzy Gillespie to Ray Charles, were all the more remarkable since Hodgson took none of them in the United States.

The shots were all taken during live performances by the stars in London.

He lived long enough to fulfil an ambition to see 50 unpublished images from his jazz collection go on display this month in the Masters of Jazz exhibition at the National Theatre in London.

He began documenting the visits of jazz musicians to Britain as a hobby and set up the Kinnerton Street Studio in Knightsbridge, where he made his living photographing models.

But his first love remained chronicling jazz musicians performing live or preparing backstage.

His photographs have been frequently reproduced around the world, appearing in retrospectives of the musicians' work.

Hodgson said that his pictures captured a golden age for jazz in Britain: "We had never seen the great jazz musicians because, until the fifties, they never came to Britain. It was an exciting time."

- INDEPENDENT