{"id":1488,"date":"2008-10-13T01:06:00","date_gmt":"2008-10-13T08:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/rifftides\/wp\/?p=1488"},"modified":"2008-10-13T01:06:00","modified_gmt":"2008-10-13T08:06:00","slug":"william_claxton_19282008","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/rifftides\/2008\/10\/william_claxton_19282008\/","title":{"rendered":"William Claxton, 1927-2008"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Word has just come in that William Claxton died on Saturday in Los Angeles of congestive<br \/>\n<span class=\"mt-enclosure mt-enclosure-image\" style=\"DISPLAY: inline\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"mt-image-right\" style=\"FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 20px 20px\" height=\"103\" alt=\"Clax.jpg\" src=\"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/rifftides\/Clax.jpg\" width=\"137\" \/><\/span>heart failure. He was one day short of his eighty-first birthday. With his pictures of Chet Baker in the early 1950s, Claxton established himself as a brilliant photographer of jazz musicians and went on to a career as one of the most admired camera artists in the world. He did incomparable work not only in jazz, but also with a varied array of personalities including Frank Sinatra, Marlene Dietrich, Igor Stravinsky, Fred Astaire, Joan Baez, Steve McQueen, Chris Rock and Benicio Del Toro. <\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\" style=\"BACKGROUND: white; MARGIN: 0in 0in 10pt; LINE-HEIGHT: normal; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto\"><span style=\"FONT-SIZE: 10pt; COLOR: #333333; FONT-FAMILY: 'Trebuchet MS','sans-serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial\">Clax was a friend, a colleague, good company&nbsp;and &#8212; in a category that seems sparsely populated in our hard, fast world &#8212; a gentleman, meaning that he was kind, polite, honorable and unfailingly considerate. <o:p><\/o:p><\/span><\/p>\n<p>\n<span class=\"mt-enclosure mt-enclosure-image\" style=\"DISPLAY: inline\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"mt-image-left\" style=\"FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 20px 20px 0px\" height=\"89\" alt=\"Chet by Claxton.jpg\" src=\"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/rifftides\/Chet%20by%20Claxton.jpg\" width=\"133\" \/><\/span>To see some of Bill Claxton&#8217;s work <a href=\"http:\/\/www.williamclaxton.com\/movie.html\" target=\"_blank\">go here<\/a>. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.latimes.com\/news\/printedition\/california\/la-me-claxton13-2008oct13,0,4633702.story\">This obituary<\/a> from <em>The Los Angeles Times<\/em> includes a striking candid portrait of Clax by the Times&#8217;s Gary Friedman and one of Clax&#8217;s shots of McQueen. It does not include one of the Chet Baker photographs that helped make Chet and Claxton famous.&nbsp;The one to your left&nbsp;is from a session for Baker&#8217;s 1954 album <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&amp;location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FChet-Baker-Strings%2Fdp%2FB000007NAE&amp;tag=rifftidougram-20&amp;linkCode=ur2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325\">Chet Baker&nbsp;And Strings<\/a><\/em>.&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Word has just come in that William Claxton died on Saturday in Los Angeles of congestive heart failure. He was one day short of his eighty-first birthday. With his pictures of Chet Baker in the early 1950s, Claxton established himself as a brilliant photographer of jazz musicians and went on to a career as one [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1488","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-main","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/rifftides\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1488","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/rifftides\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/rifftides\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/rifftides\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/rifftides\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1488"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/rifftides\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1488\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/rifftides\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/rifftides\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/rifftides\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}