JAZZ by Wynton Marsalis & Nubar Alexanian

When it comes to photography and the five senses, sight clearly has its siblings beat. But from time to time photographers come along whose images have successfully courted, and seduced, the lesser organs.

Life’s John Dominis, for example, earned considerable renown as a food photographer, creating scenes so sumptuous observers could practically taste them. Photojournalist Julio Donoso, in his memorable work on "The Essence of Grasse," depicted undulating fields of lavender and jasmine in colors vivid enough to smell. But the photographs of Nubar Alexanian are a breed rarer still.

Alexanian, it so happens, takes pictures you can hear.

His new book, JAZZ (Walker Creek Press), produced in collaboration with the Merlin of the medium, Wynton Marsalis, contains image after blues-stoked image that awaken the reader like the chords of a reveille: Marsalis the Soloist trading a tune with a backstage mirror; Marsalis the Friend helping sightless band-mate Marcus Roberts toward his piano stool; Marsalis the Mentor squeezing the puff-adder cheeks of a would-be trumpet student. The volume’s splendid design—lean and square, meant to approximate a CD jewel case—reinforces this aural aura. And on each spread Marsalis offers his own axioms, sage riffs on the spirit of jazz, accompanied by actual handwritten musical notations (to which readers can play along).

JAZZ, like Alexanian’s earlier Where Music Comes From (Dewi Lewis Publishing,
Publishing, 1996), is proof of what I would call the Alexanian doctrine: Photojournalism, like jazz, springs from astute improvisation, from the ability to interact with the cues of an environment so as to catch and expand upon the essence of a moment. The thesis is not too dissimilar from the one jazz chronicler William Claxton once offered: "Photography is jazz for the eye." David Friend is Vanity Fair’s editor of creative development. As Life’s director of photography he worked frequently with Nubar Alexanian.

Stones In The Road: Photographs of Peru by Nubar Alexanian

"For the lover of peopled enigmas and tonally rich photos splashed big across two pages, this book is a find, a breath of contemplative art in a fast-forward video world. Alexanian's pictures are metaphors. Read them like poems." The Boston Globe

"I believe we, reportage photographers of the human condition, have a moral duty to get as close as we can to the people we photograph and to draw attention to all the dignity in the world, as Nubar Alexanian has managed to do so well in this book. It gave me immense pleasure to see my Latin- American people portrayed with so much tenderness." Sebastiao Salgado

"...an authentic expression of our geography and our people making at the same time a personal statement which is artistically original and morally compelling." Mario Vargas Llosa

Where Music Comes From by Nubar Alexanian

"Nubar Alexanian, after a five-year trek across the music landscape, has done his finest work, including such diverse music personalities as Philip Glass, Aretha Franklin, Wynton Marsalis, the Roches, Paul Simon, Junior Wells and Emmylou Harris. To prepare for this project the photographer bought their music, listened to it all, watched them rehearse and perform, hung out with them, and finally, photographed them. Alexanian's photographs are brilliant, imaginative, compelling and very moving." The Picture Professional by Fred & Gloria McDarrah

Gloucester Photographs by Nubar Alexanian

"These images manage to be beautiful and honest at the same time. They are the real Gloucester, hard edges and all." Sebastian Junger, author, The Perfect Storm

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"When I first saw Nubar Alexanian's tender and astute new book of photos, Gloucester Photographs, I had a sense of moving backwards in time. Images of clam diggers on mud flats, beach goers surrounding a giant sand sculpture in the shape of a deformed man, teenagers in the back of a rented limousine on prom night - all could be fifty years old, others even older. None are. Alexanian's new book and the show that commemorates it pay homage to a city and perhaps a way of life in decline: Gloucester is a community where people live near to their relatives, visit their neighbors, worship together. What could be stranger? One thing: Alexanian's treatment of fish, their eyes, their fins, their behead bodies being cleaned. In his fish photos Alexanian finds a metaphor of the people of Gloucester - endangered, atavistic, communal - and they're as riveting as they are forlorn." Christopher Millis, The Boston Phoenix

A sense of serenity pervades Alexanian's work in his new book, Gloucester Photographs. Here are moments plucked from narratives, some peaceful, others pulsing: stories we don't know, lives of which we are not part. But Alexanian gives us enough so that we can imagine the rest, as painful or jubilant or curious as our hearts believe the stories to be. Haley Kaufman, The Boston Globe Arts Section

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Gloucester Photographs gathers over two decades of work by Nubar Alexanian, whose haunting black-and-white images depict the life of one New England coastal town, from the world of its hard-working fishermen to its sleek schooner races. Newsweek

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Alexanian aims for a strange and deeply affecting digging beyond surfaces, similar to the work of an archeologist. If the painters’ rendition of Gloucester’s luminism is achieved by means of the brush adding color to the canvas, in Alexanian’s photographs, mainly those which depict the sea and the land of Gloucester, the surface seems to have been etched, as though the photographer wanted to make way for the light to go through the image. In combination with his adherence to black and white only, this gravure-like quality turns many of Alexanian’s photographs into intensely physical, concrete and often raw images. In these images activity is something which unites the natural world of water and rock, ice and trees, and leaves and snow with the world of men and women and children going about their business against the immensity of the landscape.Taline Voskeritchian artsMedia Mag.