Review by Booklist Review
Professional performers are supposed to look good, but none of them scorns a good photographer's help. Flerlage helped blues musicians and Garret, movie stars. In new books, they share some favorite recollections and favorite images. Flerlage's pictures are more famous among blues fans than Garret's are among movie buffs. Why? Simple: they graced the covers of LPs from the foremost blues labels--Chess, Prestige, Testament, Delmark--and appeared in the foremost blues, folk, and jazz magazines. The fans know and love them, which is only right. Flerlage took up photography to shoot the blues, and no one did it better or more comprehensively. He snapped folk bluesmen like Son House and Fred MacDowell, Chicago bluesmen like Little Walter and Howlin' Wolf, big band bluesmen like B. B. King and Bobby Bland, and even soul pioneers like Jackie Wilson and Martha Reeves. He also took pictures of the performers' contexts, onstage and off. He had a terrific eye and terrific luck, such as when he was shooting an interview with John Lee Hooker, who called Muddy Waters to come over, which he did. Flerlage also had the foresight to shoot his interviewing partner, Mike Bloomfield, playing the stars' guitars not long before he became the first white Chicago blues guitar star. Garret, a Hollywood pro from 1946 to 1973, specialized in getting "candid" glimpses of the stars. Culling an archive much bigger than part-timer Flerlage's, Garret fields an album bursting with freshness. Here are Marilyn Monroe, looking ravishingly inadvertent at Grauman's Chinese Theater; Jack Benny in Roman drag, wryly clutching a cigar; Eddie Cantor showing a dance step to 16-year-old Joel Grey; Gary Cooper playing hairdresser for wrestler Gorgeous George; and lots of a Garret favorite, Bob Hope. Like Flerlage, Garret tells a little about the circumstances of certain shoots and what it was like to work with particular stars. Lengthier than Flerlage's comments, Garret's are more pat, too. Since the movies are more popular than the blues, though, Garret's deliberately appealing pictures may catch more eyes than Flerlage's ultimately more valuable volume. --Ray Olson
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
