Ogden Museum of Southern Art  has announced its new exhibition Herman Leonard: Images of Jazz, presented by The Helis Foundation. Opening Jan. 29, the exhibition features 30 selenium-toned silver gelatin prints capturing iconic jazz musicians of the 1940s and 1950s. In conjunction with the exhibition, the Museum will host a slate of exhibition-related programs and celebrate the release of a new edition of “The Photography of Herman Leonard,” a publication that showcases Leonard’s extraordinary life and distinctive body of work.

Herman Leonard is widely considered the most important photographer of jazz musicians after World War II. Born in 1923 in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Leonard lived and worked in Ottawa, New York City, Paris and Ibiza before he moved to New Orleans in 1991. As a child in Pennsylvania, Leonard received his first Kodak Brownie camera at age 11, a moment that would define the trajectory of his life.

Leonard studied photography at University of Ohio before serving in WWII, and returned to earn his degree after the war in 1947. After an apprenticeship with renowned photographer Yousef Karsh in Ottawa, Leonard opened his first studio in Greenwich Village in 1948. There, he photographed most of the major figures of the emerging bebop and cool jazz movements. Many of these icons became his close friends. Leonard’s atmospheric photographs of musicians playing their signature instruments came to represent one of the most significant bodies of work that documents this era in the history of American jazz.

In the late 1950s, Leonard left New York for Paris, where he photographed fashion and celebrities, and worked in advertising both as a freelance photographer and the European representative of Playboy Magazine. After decades in Paris, Leonard relocated his family to the island of Ibiza and began reevaluating his body of work in photography. In 1985, he published his first major book, “The Eye of Jazz.” His work was rediscovered with the unexpected success of an exhibition of his classic jazz photos in London in 1988.

In 1998, Leonard self-published this portfolio of thirty photographs in New Orleans. Hand-picked by the artist to represent the best examples of his photographic practice, each selenium-toned silver print measures 16 x 20 inches. Each print includes Leonard’s signature, title, negative date and edition notation in ink. Thirty editions were produced, each divided into three volumes of ten photos with the corresponding colophon included loose in elephant folio-sized black silk-covered clamshell boxes. The three volumes are housed in a matching slipcase. The edition featured in this exhibition (edition 16 of 30) was generously gifted to Ogden Museum of Southern Art by Stacey and Michael Burke in 2023.

Also gifted by the Burkes at the same time was an impressive collection of self-taught and vsionary art, comprised of more than 80 works by over 50 artists from 12 states across the American South. Works from this donation will be on view – more than 35 for the first time – concurrently in Burke’s Delight: The Stacey and Michael Burke Collection from January 17, 2026 – January 10, 2027.

Leonard has special ties to Ogden Museum of Southern Art, making this exhibition particularly meaningful. In August 2005, Leonard was working with the Museum on a major retrospective and publication when Hurricane Katrina approached New Orleans. Ogden Museum agreed to store Leonard’s extensive negative archive, protecting it from the storm and the catastrophic flooding that followed the levee failures. Leonard’s home and studio in the Lakeview neighborhood were destroyed, along with much of his photographic archive. Work on the exhibition and book resumed after the Museum reopened in October 2005, culminating in a book and exhibition in 2006 titled Jazz, Giants and Journeys: The Photography of Herman Leonard.

Bradley Sumrall, Curator of the Collection at Ogden Museum of Southern Art, explained in a press release: “It is such an honor to once again celebrate the artistry of Herman Leonard here at the Museum. New Orleans is both the birthplace of jazz and its beating heart. Our local audience, in particular, brings a deep lived understanding of jazz’s cultural roots and its power to help us celebrate, mourn and resist. Few photographers understood this more than Herman Leonard, and it is both why he adopted New Orleans as his home and why the city embraced him in return.”

Herman Leonard: Images of Jazz, presented by The Helis Foundation, will be accompanied by a new edition of a book published in cooperation with Ogden Museum of Southern Art and the Herman Leonard Estate. Featuring a foreword by Quincy Jones and text by David Houston, this newly updated edition is the only comprehensive treatment of Leonard’s extraordinary life and distinctive body of work. While the book foregrounds his legendary photographs of musicians, it uniquely presents the full range of his practice, including travel, war, celebrity, fashion and nude photography, as well as images from both his early and late periods. The volume includes rare portraits of cultural icons such as Marilyn Monroe at the circus and Albert Einstein at his desk, underscoring Leonard’s mastery as a portrait photographer—an expertise shaped during his formative apprenticeship with Yousuf Karsh.

Exhibition-related programming will include a Curated Conversation, a Curator Walkthrough and an Ogden After Hours jazz series. This three-part series will feature acclaimed jazz artists, with light bites and drinks available for purchase. The first event in the series will take place on January 29, 2026 from 6-8 p.m., in celebration of the exhibition’s opening, and feature acclaimed clarinetist Tim Laughlin joined by pianist David Boeddinghaus. Tickets are available at ogdenmuseum.org and at the Museum.

The exhibit is presented by The Helis Foundation, is curated by Bradley Sumrall, Curator of the Collection at Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and will be on view Jan. 29 through July 12, 2026.  To learn more about the exhibition and related programming, visit here..