Duncan Schiedt – a Biographical sketch

Duncan Schiedt, jazz photographer, author and historian, was born in Atlantic City, N.J. in 1921. He lived in New York and suburbs from 1936-1950, moving to Indiana in 1951. He currently lives in the town of Pittsboro.

The combination of two passions, jazz music and photography, led him into a career (photography) and an avocation, the photographic coverage of the music he adored. As he puts it, he became “intensely interested in the new swing music while a student in England during a two-year sojourn there. Upon returning to the United States, he took up photography as a hobby, and was soon finding his subjects at the Times Square movie palaces and their big-band stage shows.

During WW2, Schiedt served in the Army Air Force as a cameraman, and was fortunate to be employed as a civilian photographer at several series of atom bomb tests in the Western Pacific, including Operation Crossroads, at Bikini Atoll. Back in New York, he operated an advertising photography studio, and also spent some time in a theatrical photo business. All the while he continued to seek out jazz people with his camera.

He has written four books dealing with jazz: a Fats Waller biography, Ain’t Misbehavin; a history of Indiana jazz, The Jazz State of Indiana; a series of illustrated essays on jazz pioneers, Twelve Lives in Jazz; and most recently, a volume of his most important jazz photographs over sixty-five years of activity, appropriately entitled Jazz in Black and White.

Schiedt’s byline has appeared under innumerable photos in books, magazines, on record album covers, and as a contributor to many historic television programs, including Ken Burns’ Jazz, and other documentary productions. In addition to his own photography, he has collected historic jazz photos from bygone days, and manages a large archive of such images.

From the very first, he has felt that black and white is the ideal medium for jazz photos, and enjoys the photographic process all the way through to the finished print, which he personally makes in his own darkroom, feeling that if his work is to hang in a gallery or art museum, it should be totally his own.